Learned Slip-Detection-Severity Framework using Tactile Deformation Field Feedback for Robotic Manipulation

Safely handling objects and avoiding slippage are fundamental challenges in robotic manipulation, yet traditional techniques often oversimplify the issue by treating slippage as a binary occurrence. Our research presents a framework that both identifies slip incidents and measures their severity. We introduce a set of features based on detailed vector field analysis of tactile deformation data captured by the GelSight Mini sensor. Two distinct machine learning models use these features: one focuses on slip detection, and the other evaluates the slip's severity, which is the slipping velocity of the object against the sensor surface. Our slip detection model achieves an average accuracy of 92%, and the slip severity estimation model exhibits a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.6 cm/s for unseen objects. To demonstrate the synergistic approach of this framework, we employ both the models in a tactile feedback-guided vertical sliding task. Leveraging the high accuracy of slip detection, we utilize it as the foundational and corrective model and integrate the slip severity estimation into the feedback control loop to address slips without overcompensating.

FedReMa: Improving Personalized Federated Learning via Leveraging the Most Relevant Clients

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm that achieves a globally robust model through decentralized computation and periodic model synthesis, primarily focusing on the global model's accuracy over aggregated datasets of all participating clients. Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) instead tailors exclusive models for each client, aiming to enhance the accuracy of clients' individual models on specific local data distributions. Despite of their wide adoption, existing FL and PFL works have yet to comprehensively address the class-imbalance issue, one of the most critical challenges within the realm of data heterogeneity in PFL and FL research. In this paper, we propose FedReMa, an efficient PFL algorithm that can tackle class-imbalance by 1) utilizing an adaptive inter-client co-learning approach to identify and harness different clients' expertise on different data classes throughout various phases of the training process, and 2) employing distinct aggregation methods for clients' feature extractors and classifiers, with the choices informed by the different roles and implications of these model components. Specifically, driven by our experimental findings on inter-client similarity dynamics, we develop critical co-learning period (CCP), wherein we introduce a module named maximum difference segmentation (MDS) to assess and manage task relevance by analyzing the similarities between clients' logits of their classifiers. Outside the CCP, we employ an additional scheme for model aggregation that utilizes historical records of each client's most relevant peers to further enhance the personalization stability. We demonstrate the superiority of our FedReMa in extensive experiments.

FedMoE-DA: Federated Mixture of Experts via Domain Aware Fine-grained Aggregation

Federated learning (FL) is a collaborative machine learning approach that enables multiple clients to train models without sharing their private data. With the rise of deep learning, large-scale models have garnered significant attention due to their exceptional performance. However, a key challenge in FL is the limitation imposed by clients with constrained computational and communication resources, which hampers the deployment of these large models. The Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture addresses this challenge with its sparse activation property, which reduces computational workload and communication demands during inference and updates. Additionally, MoE facilitates better personalization by allowing each expert to specialize in different subsets of the data distribution. To alleviate the communication burdens between the server and clients, we propose FedMoE-DA, a new FL model training framework that leverages the MoE architecture and incorporates a novel domain-aware, fine-grained aggregation strategy to enhance the robustness, personalizability, and communication efficiency simultaneously. Specifically, the correlation between both intra-client expert models and inter-client data heterogeneity is exploited. Moreover, we utilize peer-to-peer (P2P) communication between clients for selective expert model synchronization, thus significantly reducing the server-client transmissions. Experiments demonstrate that our FedMoE-DA achieves excellent performance while reducing the communication pressure on the server.

GenSim: A General Social Simulation Platform with Large Language Model based Agents

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), recent years have witnessed many promising studies on leveraging LLM-based agents to simulate human social behavior. While prior work has demonstrated significant potential across various domains, much of it has focused on specific scenarios involving a limited number of agents and has lacked the ability to adapt when errors occur during simulation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel LLM-agent-based simulation platform called \textit{GenSim}, which: (1) \textbf{Abstracts a set of general functions} to simplify the simulation of customized social scenarios; (2) \textbf{Supports one hundred thousand agents} to better simulate large-scale populations in real-world contexts; (3) \textbf{Incorporates error-correction mechanisms} to ensure more reliable and long-term simulations. To evaluate our platform, we assess both the efficiency of large-scale agent simulations and the effectiveness of the error-correction mechanisms. To our knowledge, GenSim represents an initial step toward a general, large-scale, and correctable social simulation platform based on LLM agents, promising to further advance the field of social science.

Large Language Model Performance Benchmarking on Mobile Platforms: A Thorough Evaluation

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly integrate into every aspect of our work and daily lives, there are growing concerns about user privacy, which push the trend toward local deployment of these models. There are a number of lightweight LLMs (e.g., Gemini Nano, LLAMA2 7B) that can run locally on smartphones, providing users with greater control over their personal data. As a rapidly emerging application, we are concerned about their performance on commercial-off-the-shelf mobile devices. To fully understand the current landscape of LLM deployment on mobile platforms, we conduct a comprehensive measurement study on mobile devices. We evaluate both metrics that affect user experience, including token throughput, latency, and battery consumption, as well as factors critical to developers, such as resource utilization, DVFS strategies, and inference engines. In addition, we provide a detailed analysis of how these hardware capabilities and system dynamics affect on-device LLM performance, which may help developers identify and address bottlenecks for mobile LLM applications. We also provide comprehensive comparisons across the mobile system-on-chips (SoCs) from major vendors, highlighting their performance differences in handling LLM workloads. We hope that this study can provide insights for both the development of on-device LLMs and the design for future mobile system architecture.

Cafca: High-quality Novel View Synthesis of Expressive Faces from Casual Few-shot Captures

Volumetric modeling and neural radiance field representations have revolutionized 3D face capture and photorealistic novel view synthesis. However, these methods often require hundreds of multi-view input images and are thus inapplicable to cases with less than a handful of inputs. We present a novel volumetric prior on human faces that allows for high-fidelity expressive face modeling from as few as three input views captured in the wild. Our key insight is that an implicit prior trained on synthetic data alone can generalize to extremely challenging real-world identities and expressions and render novel views with fine idiosyncratic details like wrinkles and eyelashes. We leverage a 3D Morphable Face Model to synthesize a large training set, rendering each identity with different expressions, hair, clothing, and other assets. We then train a conditional Neural Radiance Field prior on this synthetic dataset and, at inference time, fine-tune the model on a very sparse set of real images of a single subject. On average, the fine-tuning requires only three inputs to cross the synthetic-to-real domain gap. The resulting personalized 3D model reconstructs strong idiosyncratic facial expressions and outperforms the state-of-the-art in high-quality novel view synthesis of faces from sparse inputs in terms of perceptual and photo-metric quality.

MemSim: A Bayesian Simulator for Evaluating Memory of LLM-based Personal Assistants

LLM-based agents have been widely applied as personal assistants, capable of memorizing information from user messages and responding to personal queries. However, there still lacks an objective and automatic evaluation on their memory capability, largely due to the challenges in constructing reliable questions and answers (QAs) according to user messages. In this paper, we propose MemSim, a Bayesian simulator designed to automatically construct reliable QAs from generated user messages, simultaneously keeping their diversity and scalability. Specifically, we introduce the Bayesian Relation Network (BRNet) and a causal generation mechanism to mitigate the impact of LLM hallucinations on factual information, facilitating the automatic creation of an evaluation dataset. Based on MemSim, we generate a dataset in the daily-life scenario, named MemDaily, and conduct extensive experiments to assess the effectiveness of our approach. We also provide a benchmark for evaluating different memory mechanisms in LLM-based agents with the MemDaily dataset. To benefit the research community, we have released our project at https://github.com/nuster1128/MemSim.

SinoSynth: A Physics-based Domain Randomization Approach for Generalizable CBCT Image Enhancement

Cone Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) finds diverse applications in medicine. Ensuring high image quality in CBCT scans is essential for accurate diagnosis and treatment delivery. Yet, the susceptibility of CBCT images to noise and artifacts undermines both their usefulness and reliability. Existing methods typically address CBCT artifacts through image-to-image translation approaches. These methods, however, are limited by the artifact types present in the training data, which may not cover the complete spectrum of CBCT degradations stemming from variations in imaging protocols. Gathering additional data to encompass all possible scenarios can often pose a challenge. To address this, we present SinoSynth, a physics-based degradation model that simulates various CBCT-specific artifacts to generate a diverse set of synthetic CBCT images from high-quality CT images without requiring pre-aligned data. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that several different generative networks trained on our synthesized data achieve remarkable results on heterogeneous multi-institutional datasets, outperforming even the same networks trained on actual data. We further show that our degradation model conveniently provides an avenue to enforce anatomical constraints in conditional generative models, yielding high-quality and structure-preserving synthetic CT images.

Model-in-the-Loop (MILO): Accelerating Multimodal AI Data Annotation with LLMs

The growing demand for AI training data has transformed data annotation into a global industry, but traditional approaches relying on human annotators are often time-consuming, labor-intensive, and prone to inconsistent quality. We propose the Model-in-the-Loop (MILO) framework, which integrates AI/ML models into the annotation process. Our research introduces a collaborative paradigm that leverages the strengths of both professional human annotators and large language models (LLMs). By employing LLMs as pre-annotation and real-time assistants, and judges on annotator responses, MILO enables effective interaction patterns between human annotators and LLMs. Three empirical studies on multimodal data annotation demonstrate MILO's efficacy in reducing handling time, improving data quality, and enhancing annotator experiences. We also introduce quality rubrics for flexible evaluation and fine-grained feedback on open-ended annotations. The MILO framework has implications for accelerating AI/ML development, reducing reliance on human annotation alone, and promoting better alignment between human and machine values.

See or Guess: Counterfactually Regularized Image Captioning

Image captioning, which generates natural language descriptions of the visual information in an image, is a crucial task in vision-language research. Previous models have typically addressed this task by aligning the generative capabilities of machines with human intelligence through statistical fitting of existing datasets. While effective for normal images, they may struggle to accurately describe those where certain parts of the image are obscured or edited, unlike humans who excel in such cases. These weaknesses they exhibit, including hallucinations and limited interpretability, often hinder performance in scenarios with shifted association patterns. In this paper, we present a generic image captioning framework that employs causal inference to make existing models more capable of interventional tasks, and counterfactually explainable. Our approach includes two variants leveraging either total effect or natural direct effect. Integrating them into the training process enables models to handle counterfactual scenarios, increasing their generalizability. Extensive experiments on various datasets show that our method effectively reduces hallucinations and improves the model's faithfulness to images, demonstrating high portability across both small-scale and large-scale image-to-text models. The code is available at https://github.com/Aman-4-Real/See-or-Guess.