arXiv subjects

Yi Cheng

Publications and source records attributed to Yi Cheng.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Structural Optimization of Lightweight Bipedal Robot via SERL

Designing a bipedal robot is a complex and challenging task, especially when dealing with a multitude of structural parameters. Traditional design methods often rely on human intuition and experience. However, such approaches are time-consuming, labor-intensive, lack theoretical guidance and hard to obtain optimal design results within vast design spaces, thus failing to full exploit the inherent performance potential of robots. In this context, this paper introduces the SERL (Structure Evolution Reinforcement Learning) algorithm, which combines reinforcement learning for locomotion tasks with evolution algorithms. The aim is to identify the optimal parameter combinations within a given multidimensional design space. Through the SERL algorithm, we successfully designed a bipedal robot named Wow Orin, where the optimal leg length are obtained through optimization based on body structure and motor torque. We have experimentally validated the effectiveness of the SERL algorithm, which is capable of optimizing the best structure within specified design space and task conditions. Additionally, to assess the performance gap between our designed robot and the current state-of-the-art robots, we compared Wow Orin with mainstream bipedal robots Cassie and Unitree H1. A series of experimental results demonstrate the Outstanding energy efficiency and performance of Wow Orin, further validating the feasibility of applying the SERL algorithm to practical design.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2024

Multi-rater Prompting for Ambiguous Medical Image Segmentation

Multi-rater annotations commonly occur when medical images are independently annotated by multiple experts (raters). In this paper, we tackle two challenges arisen in multi-rater annotations for medical image segmentation (called ambiguous medical image segmentation): (1) How to train a deep learning model when a group of raters produces a set of diverse but plausible annotations, and (2) how to fine-tune the model efficiently when computation resources are not available for re-training the entire model on a different dataset domain. We propose a multi-rater prompt-based approach to address these two challenges altogether. Specifically, we introduce a series of rater-aware prompts that can be plugged into the U-Net model for uncertainty estimation to handle multi-annotation cases. During the prompt-based fine-tuning process, only 0.3% of learnable parameters are required to be updated comparing to training the entire model. Further, in order to integrate expert consensus and disagreement, we explore different multi-rater incorporation strategies and design a mix-training strategy for comprehensive insight learning. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our new approach for ambiguous medical image segmentation on two public datasets while alleviating the heavy burden of model re-training.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Localized stem structures in quasi-resonant two-soliton solutions for the asymmetric Nizhnik-Novikov-Veselov system

Elastic collisions of solitons generally have a finite phase shift. When the phase shift has a finitely large value, the two vertices of the (2+1)-dimensional 2-soliton are significantly separated due to the phase shift, accompanied by the formation of a local structure connecting the two V-shaped solitons. We define this local structure as the stem structure. This study systematically investigates the localized stem structures between two solitons in the (2+1)-dimensional asymmetric Nizhnik-Novikov-Veselov system. These stem structures, arising from quasi-resonant collisions between the solitons, exhibit distinct features of spatial locality and temporal invariance. We explore two scenarios: one characterized by weakly quasi-resonant collisions (i.e. $a_{12}\approx 0$), and the other by strongly quasi-resonant collisions (i.e. $a_{12}\approx +\infty$). Through mathematical analysis, we extract comprehensive insights into the trajectories, amplitudes, and velocities of the soliton arms. Furthermore, we discuss the characteristics of the stem structures, including their length and extreme points. Our findings shed new light on the interaction between solitons in the (2+1)-dimensional asymmetric Nizhnik-Novikov-Veselov system.

nlin.SI↗

arXiv2024

Quadruped robot traversing 3D complex environments with limited perception

Traversing 3-D complex environments has always been a significant challenge for legged locomotion. Existing methods typically rely on external sensors such as vision and lidar to preemptively react to obstacles by acquiring environmental information. However, in scenarios like nighttime or dense forests, external sensors often fail to function properly, necessitating robots to rely on proprioceptive sensors to perceive diverse obstacles in the environment and respond promptly. This task is undeniably challenging. Our research finds that methods based on collision detection can enhance a robot's perception of environmental obstacles. In this work, we propose an end-to-end learning-based quadruped robot motion controller that relies solely on proprioceptive sensing. This controller can accurately detect, localize, and agilely respond to collisions in unknown and complex 3D environments, thereby improving the robot's traversability in complex environments. We demonstrate in both simulation and real-world experiments that our method enables quadruped robots to successfully traverse challenging obstacles in various complex environments.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Reasoning Like a Doctor: Improving Medical Dialogue Systems via Diagnostic Reasoning Process Alignment

Medical dialogue systems have attracted significant attention for their potential to act as medical assistants. Enabling these medical systems to emulate clinicians' diagnostic reasoning process has been the long-standing research focus. Previous studies rudimentarily realized the simulation of clinicians' diagnostic process by fine-tuning language models on high-quality dialogue datasets. Nonetheless, they overly focus on the outcomes of the clinician's reasoning process while ignoring their internal thought processes and alignment with clinician preferences. Our work aims to build a medical dialogue system that aligns with clinicians' diagnostic reasoning processes. We propose a novel framework, Emulation, designed to generate an appropriate response that relies on abductive and deductive diagnostic reasoning analyses and aligns with clinician preferences through thought process modeling. Experimental results on two datasets confirm the efficacy of Emulation. Crucially, our framework furnishes clear explanations for the generated responses, enhancing its transparency in medical consultations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

How Far Are LLMs from Believable AI? A Benchmark for Evaluating the Believability of Human Behavior Simulation

In recent years, AI has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in simulating human behaviors, particularly those implemented with large language models (LLMs). However, due to the lack of systematic evaluation of LLMs' simulated behaviors, the believability of LLMs among humans remains ambiguous, i.e., it is unclear which behaviors of LLMs are convincingly human-like and which need further improvements. In this work, we design SimulateBench to evaluate the believability of LLMs when simulating human behaviors. In specific, we evaluate the believability of LLMs based on two critical dimensions: 1) consistency: the extent to which LLMs can behave consistently with the given information of a human to simulate; and 2) robustness: the ability of LLMs' simulated behaviors to remain robust when faced with perturbations. SimulateBench includes 65 character profiles and a total of 8,400 questions to examine LLMs' simulated behaviors. Based on SimulateBench, we evaluate the performances of 10 widely used LLMs when simulating characters. The experimental results reveal that current LLMs struggle to align their behaviors with assigned characters and are vulnerable to perturbations in certain factors.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

No Two Devils Alike: Unveiling Distinct Mechanisms of Fine-tuning Attacks

The existing safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is found fragile and could be easily attacked through different strategies, such as through fine-tuning on a few harmful examples or manipulating the prefix of the generation results. However, the attack mechanisms of these strategies are still underexplored. In this paper, we ask the following question: \textit{while these approaches can all significantly compromise safety, do their attack mechanisms exhibit strong similarities?} To answer this question, we break down the safeguarding process of an LLM when encountered with harmful instructions into three stages: (1) recognizing harmful instructions, (2) generating an initial refusing tone, and (3) completing the refusal response. Accordingly, we investigate whether and how different attack strategies could influence each stage of this safeguarding process. We utilize techniques such as logit lens and activation patching to identify model components that drive specific behavior, and we apply cross-model probing to examine representation shifts after an attack. In particular, we analyze the two most representative types of attack approaches: Explicit Harmful Attack (EHA) and Identity-Shifting Attack (ISA). Surprisingly, we find that their attack mechanisms diverge dramatically. Unlike ISA, EHA tends to aggressively target the harmful recognition stage. While both EHA and ISA disrupt the latter two stages, the extent and mechanisms of their attacks differ significantly. Our findings underscore the importance of understanding LLMs' internal safeguarding process and suggest that diverse defense mechanisms are required to effectively cope with various types of attacks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Bridging the Intent Gap: Knowledge-Enhanced Visual Generation

For visual content generation, discrepancies between user intentions and the generated content have been a longstanding problem. This discrepancy arises from two main factors. First, user intentions are inherently complex, with subtle details not fully captured by input prompts. The absence of such details makes it challenging for generative models to accurately reflect the intended meaning, leading to a mismatch between the desired and generated output. Second, generative models trained on visual-label pairs lack the comprehensive knowledge to accurately represent all aspects of the input data in their generated outputs. To address these challenges, we propose a knowledge-enhanced iterative refinement framework for visual content generation. We begin by analyzing and identifying the key challenges faced by existing generative models. Then, we introduce various knowledge sources, including human insights, pre-trained models, logic rules, and world knowledge, which can be leveraged to address these challenges. Furthermore, we propose a novel visual generation framework that incorporates a knowledge-based feedback module to iteratively refine the generation process. This module gradually improves the alignment between the generated content and user intentions. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework through preliminary results, highlighting the potential of knowledge-enhanced generative models for intention-aligned content generation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

PEVA-Net: Prompt-Enhanced View Aggregation Network for Zero/Few-Shot Multi-View 3D Shape Recognition

Large vision-language models have impressively promote the performance of 2D visual recognition under zero/few-shot scenarios. In this paper, we focus on exploiting the large vision-language model, i.e., CLIP, to address zero/few-shot 3D shape recognition based on multi-view representations. The key challenge for both tasks is to generate a discriminative descriptor of the 3D shape represented by multiple view images under the scenarios of either without explicit training (zero-shot 3D shape recognition) or training with a limited number of data (few-shot 3D shape recognition). We analyze that both tasks are relevant and can be considered simultaneously. Specifically, leveraging the descriptor which is effective for zero-shot inference to guide the tuning of the aggregated descriptor under the few-shot training can significantly improve the few-shot learning efficacy. Hence, we propose Prompt-Enhanced View Aggregation Network (PEVA-Net) to simultaneously address zero/few-shot 3D shape recognition. Under the zero-shot scenario, we propose to leverage the prompts built up from candidate categories to enhance the aggregation process of multiple view-associated visual features. The resulting aggregated feature serves for effective zero-shot recognition of the 3D shapes. Under the few-shot scenario, we first exploit a transformer encoder to aggregate the view-associated visual features into a global descriptor. To tune the encoder, together with the main classification loss, we propose a self-distillation scheme via a feature distillation loss by treating the zero-shot descriptor as the guidance signal for the few-shot descriptor. This scheme can significantly enhance the few-shot learning efficacy.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Agile and versatile bipedal robot tracking control through reinforcement learning

The remarkable athletic intelligence displayed by humans in complex dynamic movements such as dancing and gymnastics suggests that the balance mechanism in biological beings is decoupled from specific movement patterns. This decoupling allows for the execution of both learned and unlearned movements under certain constraints while maintaining balance through minor whole-body coordination. To replicate this balance ability and body agility, this paper proposes a versatile controller for bipedal robots. This controller achieves ankle and body trajectory tracking across a wide range of gaits using a single small-scale neural network, which is based on a model-based IK solver and reinforcement learning. We consider a single step as the smallest control unit and design a universally applicable control input form suitable for any single-step variation. Highly flexible gait control can be achieved by combining these minimal control units with high-level policy through our extensible control interface. To enhance the trajectory-tracking capability of our controller, we utilize a three-stage training curriculum. After training, the robot can move freely between target footholds at varying distances and heights. The robot can also maintain static balance without repeated stepping to adjust posture. Finally, we evaluate the tracking accuracy of our controller on various bipedal tasks, and the effectiveness of our control framework is verified in the simulation environment.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

CARE: Causality Reasoning for Empathetic Responses by Conditional Graph Generation

Recent approaches to empathetic response generation incorporate emotion causalities to enhance comprehension of both the user's feelings and experiences. However, these approaches suffer from two critical issues. First, they only consider causalities between the user's emotion and the user's experiences, and ignore those between the user's experiences. Second, they neglect interdependence among causalities and reason them independently. To solve the above problems, we expect to reason all plausible causalities interdependently and simultaneously, given the user's emotion, dialogue history, and future dialogue content. Then, we infuse these causalities into response generation for empathetic responses. Specifically, we design a new model, i.e., the Conditional Variational Graph Auto-Encoder (CVGAE), for the causality reasoning, and adopt a multi-source attention mechanism in the decoder for the causality infusion. We name the whole framework as CARE, abbreviated for CAusality Reasoning for Empathetic conversation. Experimental results indicate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Arithmetic Feature Interaction Is Necessary for Deep Tabular Learning

Until recently, the question of the effective inductive bias of deep models on tabular data has remained unanswered. This paper investigates the hypothesis that arithmetic feature interaction is necessary for deep tabular learning. To test this point, we create a synthetic tabular dataset with a mild feature interaction assumption and examine a modified transformer architecture enabling arithmetical feature interactions, referred to as AMFormer. Results show that AMFormer outperforms strong counterparts in fine-grained tabular data modeling, data efficiency in training, and generalization. This is attributed to its parallel additive and multiplicative attention operators and prompt-based optimization, which facilitate the separation of tabular samples in an extended space with arithmetically-engineered features. Our extensive experiments on real-world data also validate the consistent effectiveness, efficiency, and rationale of AMFormer, suggesting it has established a strong inductive bias for deep learning on tabular data. Code is available at https://github.com/aigc-apps/AMFormer.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Medical Dialogue Generation via Intuitive-then-Analytical Differential Diagnosis

Medical dialogue systems have attracted growing research attention as they have the potential to provide rapid diagnoses, treatment plans, and health consultations. In medical dialogues, a proper diagnosis is crucial as it establishes the foundation for future consultations. Clinicians typically employ both intuitive and analytic reasoning to formulate a differential diagnosis. This reasoning process hypothesizes and verifies a variety of possible diseases and strives to generate a comprehensive and rigorous diagnosis. However, recent studies on medical dialogue generation have overlooked the significance of modeling a differential diagnosis, which hinders the practical application of these systems. To address the above issue, we propose a medical dialogue generation framework with the Intuitive-then-Analytic Differential Diagnosis (IADDx). Our method starts with a differential diagnosis via retrieval-based intuitive association and subsequently refines it through a graph-enhanced analytic procedure. The resulting differential diagnosis is then used to retrieve medical knowledge and guide response generation. Experimental results on two datasets validate the efficacy of our method. Besides, we demonstrate how our framework assists both clinicians and patients in understanding the diagnostic process, for instance, by producing intermediate results and graph-based diagnosis paths.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

COOPER: Coordinating Specialized Agents towards a Complex Dialogue Goal

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in exploring dialogues with more complex goals, such as negotiation, persuasion, and emotional support, which go beyond traditional service-focused dialogue systems. Apart from the requirement for much more sophisticated strategic reasoning and communication skills, a significant challenge of these tasks lies in the difficulty of objectively measuring the achievement of their goals in a quantifiable way, making it difficult for existing research to directly optimize the dialogue procedure towards them. In our work, we emphasize the multifaceted nature of complex dialogue goals and argue that it is more feasible to accomplish them by comprehensively considering and jointly promoting their different aspects. To this end, we propose a novel dialogue framework, Cooper, which coordinates multiple specialized agents, each dedicated to a specific dialogue goal aspect separately, to approach the complex objective. Through this divide-and-conquer manner, we make complex dialogue goals more approachable and elicit greater intelligence via the collaboration of individual agents. Experiments on persuasion and emotional support dialogues demonstrate the superiority of our method over a set of competitive baselines.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

SCA-PVNet: Self-and-Cross Attention Based Aggregation of Point Cloud and Multi-View for 3D Object Retrieval

To address 3D object retrieval, substantial efforts have been made to generate highly discriminative descriptors of 3D objects represented by a single modality, e.g., voxels, point clouds or multi-view images. It is promising to leverage the complementary information from multi-modality representations of 3D objects to further improve retrieval performance. However, multi-modality 3D object retrieval is rarely developed and analyzed on large-scale datasets. In this paper, we propose self-and-cross attention based aggregation of point cloud and multi-view images (SCA-PVNet) for 3D object retrieval. With deep features extracted from point clouds and multi-view images, we design two types of feature aggregation modules, namely the In-Modality Aggregation Module (IMAM) and the Cross-Modality Aggregation Module (CMAM), for effective feature fusion. IMAM leverages a self-attention mechanism to aggregate multi-view features while CMAM exploits a cross-attention mechanism to interact point cloud features with multi-view features. The final descriptor of a 3D object for object retrieval can be obtained via concatenating the aggregated features from both modules. Extensive experiments and analysis are conducted on three datasets, ranging from small to large scale, to show the superiority of the proposed SCA-PVNet over the state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

From Knowing to Doing: Learning Diverse Motor Skills through Instruction Learning

Recent years have witnessed many successful trials in the robot learning field. For contact-rich robotic tasks, it is challenging to learn coordinated motor skills by reinforcement learning. Imitation learning solves this problem by using a mimic reward to encourage the robot to track a given reference trajectory. However, imitation learning is not so efficient and may constrain the learned motion. In this paper, we propose instruction learning, which is inspired by the human learning process and is highly efficient, flexible, and versatile for robot motion learning. Instead of using a reference signal in the reward, instruction learning applies a reference signal directly as a feedforward action, and it is combined with a feedback action learned by reinforcement learning to control the robot. Besides, we propose the action bounding technique and remove the mimic reward, which is shown to be crucial for efficient and flexible learning. We compare the performance of instruction learning with imitation learning, indicating that instruction learning can greatly speed up the training process and guarantee learning the desired motion correctly. The effectiveness of instruction learning is validated through a bunch of motion learning examples for a biped robot and a quadruped robot, where skills can be learned typically within several million steps. Besides, we also conduct sim-to-real transfer and online learning experiments on a real quadruped robot. Instruction learning has shown great merits and potential, making it a promising alternative for imitation learning.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Ray computational ghost imaging based on rotational modulation method

The CGI (CGI) has the potential of low cost, low dose, and high resolution, which is very attractive for the development of radiation imaging field. However, many sub-coding plates must be used in the modulation process, which greatly affects the development of CGI technology. In order to reduce the coding plates, we refer to the rotation method of computed tomography (CT), then propose a novel CGI method based on rotational modulation method of a single-column striped coding plate. This method utilizes the spatial variation of a single sub-coding plate (rotation) to realize multiple modulation of the ray field and improves the utilization rate of a single sub-coding plate. However, for this rotation scheme of CGI, the traditional binary modulation matrix is no longer applicable. To obtain the system matrix of the rotated striped coding plate, an area model based on beam boundaries is established. Subsequently, numerical and Monte Carlo simulations were conducted. The results reveal that our scheme enables high-quality imaging of N*N resolution objects using only N sub-coding plates, under both full-sampling and under-sampling scenarios. Moreover, our scheme demonstrates superiority over the Hadamard scheme in both imaging quality and the number of required sub-coding plates, whether in scenarios of full-sampling or under-sampling. Finally, an α ray imaging platform was established to further demonstrate the feasibility of the rotational modulation method. By employing our scheme, a mere 8 sub-coding plates were employed to achieve CGI of the radiation source intensity distribution, achieving a resolution of 8*8. Therefore, the novel ray CGI based on rotational modulation method can achieve high-quality imaging effect with fewer sub-coding plates, which has important practical value and research significance for promoting single-pixel radiation imaging technology.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2023

Team I2R-VI-FF Technical Report on EPIC-KITCHENS VISOR Hand Object Segmentation Challenge 2023

In this report, we present our approach to the EPIC-KITCHENS VISOR Hand Object Segmentation Challenge, which focuses on the estimation of the relation between the hands and the objects given a single frame as input. The EPIC-KITCHENS VISOR dataset provides pixel-wise annotations and serves as a benchmark for hand and active object segmentation in egocentric video. Our approach combines the baseline method, i.e., Point-based Rendering (PointRend) and the Segment Anything Model (SAM), aiming to enhance the accuracy of hand and object segmentation outcomes, while also minimizing instances of missed detection. We leverage accurate hand segmentation maps obtained from the baseline method to extract more precise hand and in-contact object segments. We utilize the class-agnostic segmentation provided by SAM and apply specific hand-crafted constraints to enhance the results. In cases where the baseline model misses the detection of hands or objects, we re-train an object detector on the training set to enhance the detection accuracy. The detected hand and in-contact object bounding boxes are then used as prompts to extract their respective segments from the output of SAM. By effectively combining the strengths of existing methods and applying our refinements, our submission achieved the 1st place in terms of evaluation criteria in the VISOR HOS Challenge.

cs.CV↗