arXiv subjects

Yan Ding

Publications and source records attributed to Yan Ding.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Robot Task Planning and Situation Handling in Open Worlds

Automated task planning algorithms have been developed to help robots complete complex tasks that require multiple actions. Most of those algorithms have been developed for "closed worlds" assuming complete world knowledge is provided. However, the real world is generally open, and the robots frequently encounter unforeseen situations that can potentially break the planner's completeness. This paper introduces a novel algorithm (COWP) for open-world task planning and situation handling that dynamically augments the robot's action knowledge with task-oriented common sense. In particular, common sense is extracted from Large Language Models based on the current task at hand and robot skills. For systematic evaluations, we collected a dataset that includes 561 execution-time situations in a dining domain, where each situation corresponds to a state instance of a robot being potentially unable to complete a task using a solution that normally works. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms competitive baselines from the literature in the success rate of service tasks. Additionally, we have demonstrated COWP using a mobile manipulator. The project website is available at: https://cowplanning.github.io/, where a more detailed version can also be found. This version has been accepted for publication in Autonomous Robots.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Unveiling the $a_0(1710)$ nature in the process $J/ψ\to {\bar{K}}^0K^+ρ^- $

We have investigated the process $J/ψ\to {\bar{K}}^0K^+ρ^-$ by taking into account the $S$-wave ${K^*\bar{K}^*}$, $ρω$, and $ρϕ$ final-state interactions, where the scalar meson $a_0(1710)$ is generated. In addition, we also take into account the contributions from the scalar $a_0(980)(\to \bar{K}^0K^+)$ and the intermediate resonances $K_1(1270)^{-}(\to {\bar{K}}^0ρ^-) $ and $K_1(1270)^{0}(\to K^+ρ^-)$. Our results show that, in the ${\bar{K}^0K^+}$ invariant mass distribution, a clear peak structure around 1.8~GeV appears, which could be associated with the scalar $a_0(1710)$, however, no significant structure of the $a_0(980)$ is observed. On the other hand, one can find clear peaks of the $K_1(1270)$ in the ${\bar{K}}^0ρ^-$ and $K^+ρ^-$ invariant mass distributions. The future precise measurement of this process by the BESIII and Belle II Collaborations and the planned Super Tau-Charm Facility (STCF) in the future could shed light on the nature of $a_0(1710)$.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2024

A New Clustering-based View Planning Method for Building Inspection with Drone

With the rapid development of drone technology, the application of drones equipped with visual sensors for building inspection and surveillance has attracted much attention. View planning aims to find a set of near-optimal viewpoints for vision-related tasks to achieve the vision coverage goal. This paper proposes a new clustering-based two-step computational method using spectral clustering, local potential field method, and hyper-heuristic algorithm to find near-optimal views to cover the target building surface. In the first step, the proposed method generates candidate viewpoints based on spectral clustering and corrects the positions of candidate viewpoints based on our newly proposed local potential field method. In the second step, the optimization problem is converted into a Set Covering Problem (SCP), and the optimal viewpoint subset is solved using our proposed hyper-heuristic algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed method is able to obtain better solutions with fewer viewpoints and higher coverage.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

DKPROMPT: Domain Knowledge Prompting Vision-Language Models for Open-World Planning

Vision-language models (VLMs) have been applied to robot task planning problems, where the robot receives a task in natural language and generates plans based on visual inputs. While current VLMs have demonstrated strong vision-language understanding capabilities, their performance is still far from being satisfactory in planning tasks. At the same time, although classical task planners, such as PDDL-based, are strong in planning for long-horizon tasks, they do not work well in open worlds where unforeseen situations are common. In this paper, we propose a novel task planning and execution framework, called DKPROMPT, which automates VLM prompting using domain knowledge in PDDL for classical planning in open worlds. Results from quantitative experiments show that DKPROMPT outperforms classical planning, pure VLM-based and a few other competitive baselines in task completion rate.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

AdaMR: Adaptable Molecular Representation for Unified Pre-training Strategy

We propose Adjustable Molecular Representation (AdaMR), a new large-scale uniform pre-training strategy for small-molecule drugs, as a novel unified pre-training strategy. AdaMR utilizes a granularity-adjustable molecular encoding strategy, which is accomplished through a pre-training job termed molecular canonicalization, setting it apart from recent large-scale molecular models. This adaptability in granularity enriches the model's learning capability at multiple levels and improves its performance in multi-task scenarios. Specifically, the substructure-level molecular representation preserves information about specific atom groups or arrangements, influencing chemical properties and functionalities. This proves advantageous for tasks such as property prediction. Simultaneously, the atomic-level representation, combined with generative molecular canonicalization pre-training tasks, enhances validity, novelty, and uniqueness in generative tasks. All of these features work together to give AdaMR outstanding performance on a range of downstream tasks. We fine-tuned our proposed pre-trained model on six molecular property prediction tasks (MoleculeNet datasets) and two generative tasks (ZINC250K datasets), achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on five out of eight tasks.

q-bio.BM↗

arXiv2023

Theoretical study of scalar meson $a_0(1710)$ in the $η_c \to {\bar{K}}^0K^+π^- $ reaction

We investigate the process $η_c \to {\bar{K}}^0K^+π^-$ by taking into account the $S$-wave ${K^*\bar{K}^*}$ and $ρω$ interactions within the unitary coupled-channel approach, where the scalar meson $a_0(1710)$ is dynamically generated. In addition, the contributions from the intermediate resonances $K_0^*(1430)^{-}\to {\bar{K}}^0π^- $ and $K_0^*(1430)^{0}\to K^+π^-$ are also considered. We find a significant dip structure around 1.8~GeV, associated to the $a_0(1710)$, in the ${\bar{K}^0K^+}$ invariant mass distribution, and the clear peaks of the $K_0^*(1430)$ in the ${\bar{K}}^0π^-$ and $K^+π^-$ invariant mass distributions, consistent with the {\it BABAR} measurements. We further estimate the branching fractions $\mathcal{B}(η_c \to \bar{K}^{*0}K^{\ast+}π^-)= 5.5\times10^{-3}$ and $\mathcal{B}(η_c \to ωρ^+π^-)= 7.9\times10^{-3}$. Our predictions can be tested by the BESIII and BelleII experiments in the future.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2023

TrTr: A Versatile Pre-Trained Large Traffic Model based on Transformer for Capturing Trajectory Diversity in Vehicle Population

Understanding trajectory diversity is a fundamental aspect of addressing practical traffic tasks. However, capturing the diversity of trajectories presents challenges, particularly with traditional machine learning and recurrent neural networks due to the requirement of large-scale parameters. The emerging Transformer technology, renowned for its parallel computation capabilities enabling the utilization of models with hundreds of millions of parameters, offers a promising solution. In this study, we apply the Transformer architecture to traffic tasks, aiming to learn the diversity of trajectories within vehicle populations. We analyze the Transformer's attention mechanism and its adaptability to the goals of traffic tasks, and subsequently, design specific pre-training tasks. To achieve this, we create a data structure tailored to the attention mechanism and introduce a set of noises that correspond to spatio-temporal demands, which are incorporated into the structured data during the pre-training process. The designed pre-training model demonstrates excellent performance in capturing the spatial distribution of the vehicle population, with no instances of vehicle overlap and an RMSE of 0.6059 when compared to the ground truth values. In the context of time series prediction, approximately 95% of the predicted trajectories' speeds closely align with the true speeds, within a deviation of 7.5144m/s. Furthermore, in the stability test, the model exhibits robustness by continuously predicting a time series ten times longer than the input sequence, delivering smooth trajectories and showcasing diverse driving behaviors. The pre-trained model also provides a good basis for downstream fine-tuning tasks. The number of parameters of our model is over 50 million.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

Task and Motion Planning with Large Language Models for Object Rearrangement

Multi-object rearrangement is a crucial skill for service robots, and commonsense reasoning is frequently needed in this process. However, achieving commonsense arrangements requires knowledge about objects, which is hard to transfer to robots. Large language models (LLMs) are one potential source of this knowledge, but they do not naively capture information about plausible physical arrangements of the world. We propose LLM-GROP, which uses prompting to extract commonsense knowledge about semantically valid object configurations from an LLM and instantiates them with a task and motion planner in order to generalize to varying scene geometry. LLM-GROP allows us to go from natural-language commands to human-aligned object rearrangement in varied environments. Based on human evaluations, our approach achieves the highest rating while outperforming competitive baselines in terms of success rate while maintaining comparable cumulative action costs. Finally, we demonstrate a practical implementation of LLM-GROP on a mobile manipulator in real-world scenarios. Supplementary materials are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/llm-grop

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Integrating Action Knowledge and LLMs for Task Planning and Situation Handling in Open Worlds

Task planning systems have been developed to help robots use human knowledge (about actions) to complete long-horizon tasks. Most of them have been developed for "closed worlds" while assuming the robot is provided with complete world knowledge. However, the real world is generally open, and the robots frequently encounter unforeseen situations that can potentially break the planner's completeness. Could we leverage the recent advances on pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable classical planning systems to deal with novel situations? This paper introduces a novel framework, called COWP, for open-world task planning and situation handling. COWP dynamically augments the robot's action knowledge, including the preconditions and effects of actions, with task-oriented commonsense knowledge. COWP embraces the openness from LLMs, and is grounded to specific domains via action knowledge. For systematic evaluations, we collected a dataset that includes 1,085 execution-time situations. Each situation corresponds to a state instance wherein a robot is potentially unable to complete a task using a solution that normally works. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms competitive baselines from the literature in the success rate of service tasks. Additionally, we have demonstrated COWP using a mobile manipulator. Supplementary materials are available at: https://cowplanning.github.io/

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Towards Robust Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis through Non-counterfactual Augmentations

While state-of-the-art NLP models have demonstrated excellent performance for aspect based sentiment analysis (ABSA), substantial evidence has been presented on their lack of robustness. This is especially manifested as significant degradation in performance when faced with out-of-distribution data. Recent solutions that rely on counterfactually augmented datasets show promising results, but they are inherently limited because of the lack of access to explicit causal structure. In this paper, we present an alternative approach that relies on non-counterfactual data augmentation. Our proposal instead relies on using noisy, cost-efficient data augmentations that preserve semantics associated with the target aspect. Our approach then relies on modelling invariances between different versions of the data to improve robustness. A comprehensive suite of experiments shows that our proposal significantly improves upon strong pre-trained baselines on both standard and robustness-specific datasets. Our approach further establishes a new state-of-the-art on the ABSA robustness benchmark and transfers well across domains.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Symbolic State Space Optimization for Long Horizon Mobile Manipulation Planning

In existing task and motion planning (TAMP) research, it is a common assumption that experts manually specify the state space for task-level planning. A well-developed state space enables the desirable distribution of limited computational resources between task planning and motion planning. However, developing such task-level state spaces can be non-trivial in practice. In this paper, we consider a long horizon mobile manipulation domain including repeated navigation and manipulation. We propose Symbolic State Space Optimization (S3O) for computing a set of abstracted locations and their 2D geometric groundings for generating task-motion plans in such domains. Our approach has been extensively evaluated in simulation and demonstrated on a real mobile manipulator working on clearing up dining tables. Results show the superiority of the proposed method over TAMP baselines in task completion rate and execution time.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Grounding Classical Task Planners via Vision-Language Models

Classical planning systems have shown great advances in utilizing rule-based human knowledge to compute accurate plans for service robots, but they face challenges due to the strong assumptions of perfect perception and action executions. To tackle these challenges, one solution is to connect the symbolic states and actions generated by classical planners to the robot's sensory observations, thus closing the perception-action loop. This research proposes a visually-grounded planning framework, named TPVQA, which leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to detect action failures and verify action affordances towards enabling successful plan execution. Results from quantitative experiments show that TPVQA surpasses competitive baselines from previous studies in task completion rate.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

ARDIE: AR, Dialogue, and Eye Gaze Policies for Human-Robot Collaboration

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) has become increasingly relevant in industrial, household, and commercial settings. However, the effectiveness of such collaborations is highly dependent on the human and robots' situational awareness of the environment. Improving this awareness includes not only aligning perceptions in a shared workspace, but also bidirectionally communicating intent and visualizing different states of the environment to enhance scene understanding. In this paper, we propose ARDIE (Augmented Reality with Dialogue and Eye Gaze), a novel intelligent agent that leverages multi-modal feedback cues to enhance HRC. Our system utilizes a decision theoretic framework to formulate a joint policy that incorporates interactive augmented reality (AR), natural language, and eye gaze to portray current and future states of the environment. Through object-specific AR renders, the human can visualize future object interactions to make adjustments as needed, ultimately providing an interactive and efficient collaboration between humans and robots.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2022

GLAD: Grounded Layered Autonomous Driving for Complex Service Tasks

Given the current point-to-point navigation capabilities of autonomous vehicles, researchers are looking into complex service requests that require the vehicles to visit multiple points of interest. In this paper, we develop a layered planning framework, called GLAD, for complex service requests in autonomous urban driving. There are three layers for service-level, behavior-level, and motion-level planning. The layered framework is unique in its tight coupling, where the different layers communicate user preferences, safety estimates, and motion costs for system optimization. GLAD is visually grounded by perceptual learning from a dataset of 13.8k instances collected from driving behaviors. GLAD enables autonomous vehicles to efficiently and safely fulfill complex service requests. Experimental results from abstract and full simulation show that our system outperforms a few competitive baselines from the literature.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2022

Relational graph convolutional networks for predicting blood-brain barrier penetration of drug molecules

Evaluating the blood-brain barrier (BBB) permeability of drug molecules is a critical step in brain drug development. Traditional methods for the evaluation require complicated in vitro or in vivo testing. Alternatively, in silico predictions based on machine learning have proved to be a cost-efficient way to complement the in vitro and in vivo methods. However, the performance of the established models has been limited by their incapability of dealing with the interactions between drugs and proteins, which play an important role in the mechanism behind the BBB penetrating behaviors. To address this limitation, we employed the relational graph convolutional network (RGCN) to handle the drug-protein interactions as well as the properties of each individual drug. The RGCN model achieved an overall accuracy of 0.872, an AUROC of 0.919 and an AUPRC of 0.838 for the testing dataset with the drug-protein interactions and the Mordred descriptors as the input. Introducing drug-drug similarity to connect structurally similar drugs in the data graph further improved the testing results, giving an overall accuracy of 0.876, an AUROC of 0.926 and an AUPRC of 0.865. In particular, the RGCN model was found to greatly outperform the LightGBM base model when evaluated with the drugs whose BBB penetration was dependent on drug-protein interactions. Our model is expected to provide high-confidence predictions of BBB permeability for drug prioritization in the experimental screening of BBB-penetrating drugs.

q-bio.QM↗

arXiv2022

SimpleTrack: Rethinking and Improving the JDE Approach for Multi-Object Tracking

Joint detection and embedding (JDE) based methods usually estimate bounding boxes and embedding features of objects with a single network in Multi-Object Tracking (MOT). In the tracking stage, JDE-based methods fuse the target motion information and appearance information by applying the same rule, which could fail when the target is briefly lost or blocked. To overcome this problem, we propose a new association matrix, the Embedding and Giou matrix, which combines embedding cosine distance and Giou distance of objects. To further improve the performance of data association, we develop a simple, effective tracker named SimpleTrack, which designs a bottom-up fusion method for Re-identity and proposes a new tracking strategy based on our EG matrix. The experimental results indicate that SimpleTrack has powerful data association capability, e.g., 61.6 HOTA and 76.3 IDF1 on MOT17. In addition, we apply the EG matrix to 5 different state-of-the-art JDE-based methods and achieve significant improvements in IDF1, HOTA and IDsw metrics, and increase the tracking speed of these methods by about 20%.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Visually Grounded Task and Motion Planning for Mobile Manipulation

Task and motion planning (TAMP) algorithms aim to help robots achieve task-level goals, while maintaining motion-level feasibility. This paper focuses on TAMP domains that involve robot behaviors that take extended periods of time (e.g., long-distance navigation). In this paper, we develop a visual grounding approach to help robots probabilistically evaluate action feasibility, and introduce a TAMP algorithm, called GROP, that optimizes both feasibility and efficiency. We have collected a dataset that includes 96,000 simulated trials of a robot conducting mobile manipulation tasks, and then used the dataset to learn to ground symbolic spatial relationships for action feasibility evaluation. Compared with competitive TAMP baselines, GROP exhibited a higher task-completion rate while maintaining lower or comparable action costs. In addition to these extensive experiments in simulation, GROP is fully implemented and tested on a real robot system.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2022

Learning to Ground Objects for Robot Task and Motion Planning

Task and motion planning (TAMP) algorithms have been developed to help robots plan behaviors in discrete and continuous spaces. Robots face complex real-world scenarios, where it is hardly possible to model all objects or their physical properties for robot planning (e.g., in kitchens or shopping centers). In this paper, we define a new object-centric TAMP problem, where the TAMP robot does not know object properties (e.g., size and weight of blocks). We then introduce Task-Motion Object-Centric planning ({\bf TMOC}), a grounded TAMP algorithm that learns to ground objects and their physical properties with a physics engine. TMOC is particularly useful for those tasks that involve dynamic complex robot-multi-object interactions that can hardly be modeled beforehand. We have demonstrated and evaluated TMOC in simulation and using a real robot. Results show that TMOC outperforms competitive baselines from the literature in cumulative utility.

cs.RO↗