arXiv subjects

Mingxuan Li

Publications and source records attributed to Mingxuan Li.

52 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Learning Gentle Grasping from Human-Free Force Control Demonstration

Humans can steadily and gently grasp unfamiliar objects based on tactile perception. Robots still face challenges in achieving similar performance due to the difficulty of learning accurate grasp-force predictions and force control strategies that can be generalized from limited data. In this article, we propose an approach for learning grasping from ideal force control demonstrations, to achieve similar performance of human hands with limited data size. Our approach utilizes objects with known contact characteristics to automatically generate reference force curves without human demonstrations. In addition, we design the dual convolutional neural networks (Dual-CNN) architecture which incorporats a physics-based mechanics module for learning target grasping force predictions from demonstrations. The described method can be effectively applied in vision-based tactile sensors and enables gentle and stable grasping of objects from the ground. The described prediction model and grasping strategy were validated in offline evaluations and online experiments, and the accuracy and generalizability were demonstrated.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

The Comparison of Individual Cat Recognition Using Neural Networks

Facial recognition using deep learning has been widely used in social life for applications such as authentication, smart door locks, and photo grouping, etc. More and more networks have been developed to facilitate computer vision tasks, such as ResNet, DenseNet, EfficientNet, ConvNeXt, and Siamese networks. However, few studies have systematically compared the advantages and disadvantages of such neural networks in identifying individuals from images, especially for pet animals like cats. In the present study, by systematically comparing the efficacy of different neural networks in cat recognition, we found traditional CNNs trained with transfer learning have better performance than models trained with the fine-tuning method or Siamese networks in individual cat recognition. In addition, ConvNeXt and DenseNet yield significant results which could be further optimized for individual cat recognition in pet stores and in the wild. These results provide a method to improve cat management in pet stores and monitoring of cats in the wild.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Power-LLaVA: Large Language and Vision Assistant for Power Transmission Line Inspection

The inspection of power transmission line has achieved notable achievements in the past few years, primarily due to the integration of deep learning technology. However, current inspection approaches continue to encounter difficulties in generalization and intelligence, which restricts their further applicability. In this paper, we introduce Power-LLaVA, the first large language and vision assistant designed to offer professional and reliable inspection services for power transmission line by engaging in dialogues with humans. Moreover, we also construct a large-scale and high-quality dataset specialized for the inspection task. By employing a two-stage training strategy on the constructed dataset, Power-LLaVA demonstrates exceptional performance at a comparatively low training cost. Extensive experiments further prove the great capabilities of Power-LLaVA within the realm of power transmission line inspection. Code shall be released.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

EasyCalib: Simple and Low-Cost In-Situ Calibration for Force Reconstruction with Vision-Based Tactile Sensors

For elastomer-based tactile sensors, represented by visuotactile sensors, routine calibration of mechanical parameters (Young's modulus and Poisson's ratio) has been shown to be important for force reconstruction. However, the reliance on existing in-situ calibration methods for accurate force measurements limits their cost-effective and flexible applications. This article proposes a new in-situ calibration scheme that relies only on comparing contact deformation. Based on the detailed derivations of the normal contact and torsional contact theories, we designed a simple and low-cost calibration device, EasyCalib, and validated its effectiveness through extensive finite element analysis. We also explored the accuracy of EasyCalib in the practical application and demonstrated that accurate contact distributed force reconstruction can be realized based on the mechanical parameters obtained. EasyCalib balances low hardware cost, ease of operation, and low dependence on technical expertise and is expected to provide the necessary accuracy guarantees for wide applications of visuotactile sensors in the wild.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Incipient Slip-Based Rotation Measurement via Visuotactile Sensing During In-Hand Object Pivoting

In typical in-hand manipulation tasks represented by object pivoting, the real-time perception of rotational slippage has been proven beneficial for improving the dexterity and stability of robotic hands. An effective strategy is to obtain the contact properties for measuring rotation angle through visuotactile sensing. However, existing methods for rotation estimation did not consider the impact of the incipient slip during the pivoting process, which introduces measurement errors and makes it hard to determine the boundary between stable contact and macro slip. This paper describes a generalized 2-d contact model under pivoting, and proposes a rotation measurement method based on the line-features in the stick region. The proposed method was applied to the Tac3D vision-based tactile sensors using continuous marker patterns. Experiments show that the rotation measurement system could achieve an average static measurement error of 0.17 degree and an average dynamic measurement error of 1.34 degree. Besides, the proposed method requires no training data and can achieve real-time sensing during the in-hand object pivoting.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

AttentionLego: An Open-Source Building Block For Spatially-Scalable Large Language Model Accelerator With Processing-In-Memory Technology

Large language models (LLMs) with Transformer architectures have become phenomenal in natural language processing, multimodal generative artificial intelligence, and agent-oriented artificial intelligence. The self-attention module is the most dominating sub-structure inside Transformer-based LLMs. Computation using general-purpose graphics processing units (GPUs) inflicts reckless demand for I/O bandwidth for transferring intermediate calculation results between memories and processing units. To tackle this challenge, this work develops a fully customized vanilla self-attention accelerator, AttentionLego, as the basic building block for constructing spatially expandable LLM processors. AttentionLego provides basic implementation with fully-customized digital logic incorporating Processing-In-Memory (PIM) technology. It is based on PIM-based matrix-vector multiplication and look-up table-based Softmax design. The open-source code is available online: https://bonany.cc/attentionleg.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2023

Datasets and Benchmarks for Nanophotonic Structure and Parametric Design Simulations

Nanophotonic structures have versatile applications including solar cells, anti-reflective coatings, electromagnetic interference shielding, optical filters, and light emitting diodes. To design and understand these nanophotonic structures, electrodynamic simulations are essential. These simulations enable us to model electromagnetic fields over time and calculate optical properties. In this work, we introduce frameworks and benchmarks to evaluate nanophotonic structures in the context of parametric structure design problems. The benchmarks are instrumental in assessing the performance of optimization algorithms and identifying an optimal structure based on target optical properties. Moreover, we explore the impact of varying grid sizes in electrodynamic simulations, shedding light on how evaluation fidelity can be strategically leveraged in enhancing structure designs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Real-time and Robust Feature Detection of Continuous Marker Pattern for Dense 3-D Deformation Measurement

Visuotactile sensing technology has received much attention in recent years. This article proposes a feature detection method applicable to visuotactile sensors based on continuous marker patterns (CMP) to measure 3-d deformation. First, we construct the feature model of checkerboard-like corners under contact deformation, and design a novel double-layer circular sampler. Then, we propose the judging criteria and response function of corner features by analyzing sampling signals' amplitude-frequency characteristics and circular cross-correlation behavior. The proposed feature detection algorithm fully considers the boundary characteristics retained by the corners with geometric distortion, thus enabling reliable detection at a low calculation cost. The experimental results show that the proposed method has significant advantages in terms of real-time and robustness. Finally, we have achieved the high-density 3-d contact deformation visualization based on this detection method. This technique is able to clearly record the process of contact deformation, thus enabling inverse sensing of dynamic contact processes.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Interpretability is a Kind of Safety: An Interpreter-based Ensemble for Adversary Defense

While having achieved great success in rich real-life applications, deep neural network (DNN) models have long been criticized for their vulnerability to adversarial attacks. Tremendous research efforts have been dedicated to mitigating the threats of adversarial attacks, but the essential trait of adversarial examples is not yet clear, and most existing methods are yet vulnerable to hybrid attacks and suffer from counterattacks. In light of this, in this paper, we first reveal a gradient-based correlation between sensitivity analysis-based DNN interpreters and the generation process of adversarial examples, which indicates the Achilles's heel of adversarial attacks and sheds light on linking together the two long-standing challenges of DNN: fragility and unexplainability. We then propose an interpreter-based ensemble framework called X-Ensemble for robust adversary defense. X-Ensemble adopts a novel detection-rectification process and features in building multiple sub-detectors and a rectifier upon various types of interpretation information toward target classifiers. Moreover, X-Ensemble employs the Random Forests (RF) model to combine sub-detectors into an ensemble detector for adversarial hybrid attacks defense. The non-differentiable property of RF further makes it a precious choice against the counterattack of adversaries. Extensive experiments under various types of state-of-the-art attacks and diverse attack scenarios demonstrate the advantages of X-Ensemble to competitive baseline methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Understand Code Style: Efficient CNN-based Compiler Optimization Recognition System

Compiler optimization level recognition can be applied to vulnerability discovery and binary analysis. Due to the exists of many different compilation optimization options, the difference in the contents of the binary file is very complicated. There are thousands of compiler optimization algorithms and multiple different processor architectures, so it is very difficult to manually analyze binary files and recognize its compiler optimization level with rules. This paper first proposes a CNN-based compiler optimization level recognition model: BinEye. The system extracts semantic and structural differences and automatically recognize the compiler optimization levels. The model is designed to be very suitable for binary file processing and is easy to understand. We built a dataset containing 80,028 binary files for the model training and testing. Our proposed model achieves an accuracy of over 97%. At the same time, BinEye is a fully CNN-based system and it has a faster forward calculation speed, at least 8 times faster than the normal RNN-based model. Through our analysis of the model output, we successfully found the difference in assembly codes caused by the different compiler optimization level. This means that the model we proposed is interpretable. Based on our model, we propose a method to analyze the code differences caused by different compiler optimization levels, which has great guiding significance for analyzing closed source compilers and binary security analysis.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2022

Intelligent detect for substation insulator defects based on CenterMask

With the development of intelligent operation and maintenance of substations, the daily inspection of substations needs to process massive video and image data. This puts forward higher requirements on the processing speed and accuracy of defect detection. Based on the end-to-end learning paradigm, this paper proposes an intelligent detection method for substation insulator defects based on CenterMask. First, the backbone network VoVNet is improved according to the residual connection and eSE module, which effectively solves the problems of deep network saturation and gradient information loss. On this basis, an insulator mask generation method based on a spatial attentiondirected mechanism is proposed. Insulators with complex image backgrounds are accurately segmented. Then, three strategies of pixel-wise regression prediction, multi-scale features and centerness are introduced. The anchor-free single-stage target detector accurately locates the defect points of insulators. Finally, an example analysis is carried out with the substation inspection image of a power supply company in a certain area to verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2021

Learning Generalizable Behavior via Visual Rewrite Rules

Though deep reinforcement learning agents have achieved unprecedented success in recent years, their learned policies can be brittle, failing to generalize to even slight modifications of their environments or unfamiliar situations. The black-box nature of the neural network learning dynamics makes it impossible to audit trained deep agents and recover from such failures. In this paper, we propose a novel representation and learning approach to capture environment dynamics without using neural networks. It originates from the observation that, in games designed for people, the effect of an action can often be perceived in the form of local changes in consecutive visual observations. Our algorithm is designed to extract such vision-based changes and condense them into a set of action-dependent descriptive rules, which we call ''visual rewrite rules'' (VRRs). We also present preliminary results from a VRR agent that can explore, expand its rule set, and solve a game via planning with its learned VRR world model. In several classical games, our non-deep agent demonstrates superior performance, extreme sample efficiency, and robust generalization ability compared with several mainstream deep agents.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2021

Towards Sample Efficient Agents through Algorithmic Alignment

In this work, we propose and explore Deep Graph Value Network (DeepGV) as a promising method to work around sample complexity in deep reinforcement-learning agents using a message-passing mechanism. The main idea is that the agent should be guided by structured non-neural-network algorithms like dynamic programming. According to recent advances in algorithmic alignment, neural networks with structured computation procedures can be trained efficiently. We demonstrate the potential of graph neural network in supporting sample efficient learning by showing that Deep Graph Value Network can outperform unstructured baselines by a large margin in solving the Markov Decision Process (MDP). We believe this would open up a new avenue for structured agent design. See https://github.com/drmeerkat/Deep-Graph-Value-Network for the code.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2021

Flexibility Requirement when Tracking Renewable Power Fluctuation with Peer-to-Peer Energy Sharing

Flexible load at the demand-side has been regarded as an effective measure to cope with volatile distributed renewable generations. To unlock the demand-side flexibility, this paper proposes a peer-to-peer energy sharing mechanism that facilitates energy exchange among users while preserving privacy. We prove the existence and partial uniqueness of the energy sharing market equilibrium and provide a centralized optimization to obtain the equilibrium. The centralized optimization is further linearized by a convex combination approach, turning into a multi-parametric linear program (MP-LP) with renewable output deviations being the parameters. The flexibility requirement of individual users is calculated based on this MP-LP. To be specific, an adaptive vertex generation algorithm is established to construct a piecewise linear estimator of the optimal total cost subject to a given error tolerance. Critical regions and optimal strategies are retrieved from the obtained approximate cost function to evaluate the flexibility requirement. The proposed algorithm does not rely on the exact characterization of optimal basis invariant sets and thus is not influenced by model degeneracy, a common difficulty faced by existing approaches. Case studies validate the theoretical results and show that the proposed method is scalable.

math.OC↗

arXiv2021

Deep Compression of Neural Networks for Fault Detection on Tennessee Eastman Chemical Processes

Artificial neural network has achieved the state-of-art performance in fault detection on the Tennessee Eastman process, but it often requires enormous memory to fund its massive parameters. In order to implement online real-time fault detection, three deep compression techniques (pruning, clustering, and quantization) are applied to reduce the computational burden. We have extensively studied 7 different combinations of compression techniques, all methods achieve high model compression rates over 64% while maintain high fault detection accuracy. The best result is applying all three techniques, which reduces the model sizes by 91.5% and remains a high accuracy over 94%. This result leads to a smaller storage requirement in production environments, and makes the deployment smoother in real world.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Are L2 adversarial examples intrinsically different?

Deep Neural Network (DDN) has achieved notable success in various tasks, including many security concerning scenarios. However, a considerable amount of work has proved its vulnerability to adversaries. We unravel the properties that can intrinsically differentiate adversarial examples and normal inputs through theoretical analysis. That is, adversarial examples generated by $L_2$ attacks usually have larger input sensitivity which can be used to identify them efficiently. We also found that those generated by $L_\infty$ attacks will be different enough in the pixel domain to be detected empirically. To verify our analysis, we proposed a \textbf{G}uided \textbf{C}omplementary \textbf{D}efense module (\textbf{GCD}) integrating detection and recovery processes. When compared with adversarial detection methods, our detector achieves a detection AUC of over 0.98 against most of the attacks. When comparing our guided rectifier with commonly used adversarial training methods and other rectification methods, our rectifier outperforms them by a large margin. We achieve a recovered classification accuracy of up to 99\% on MNIST, 89\% on CIFAR-10, and 87\% on ImageNet subsets against $L_2$ attacks. Furthermore, under the white-box setting, our holistic defensive module shows a promising degree of robustness. Thus, we confirm that at least $L_2$ adversarial examples are intrinsically different enough from normal inputs both theoretically and empirically. And we shed light upon designing simple yet effective defensive methods with these properties.

cs.CV↗