We introduce Go-Slam, a novel framework that combines 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM with grounded object segmentation and open-vocabulary querying to enable object-aware 3D scene reconstruction. Go-Slam incrementally builds high-fidelity 3D maps from RGB-D inputs while embedding semantic information by assigning unique object identifiers to Gaussian primitives. This integration allows the system to support flexible, natural language queries and accurately localize objects in complex, static environments. To achieve robust semantic mapping, Go-Slam leverages object detection and segmentation models, enabling consistent object identification across frames without relying on predefined categories. We evaluate Go-Slam across diverse indoor scenes, demonstrating improvements over existing baselines in both reconstruction quality and object localization accuracy. Our results show that Go-Slam effectively bridges the gap between geometric mapping and semantic understanding, supporting real-time scene interaction and object retrieval in open-world environments.

For many years, topological data analysis (TDA) and deep learning (DL) have been considered separate data analysis and representation learning approaches, which have nothing in common. The root cause of this challenge comes from the difficulties in building, extracting, and integrating TDA constructs, such as barcodes or persistent diagrams, within deep neural network architectures. Therefore, the powers of these two approaches are still on their islands and have not yet combined to form more powerful tools for dealing with multiple complex data analysis tasks. Fortunately, we have witnessed several remarkable attempts to integrate DL-based architectures with topological learning paradigms in recent years. These topology-driven DL techniques have notably improved data-driven analysis and mining problems, especially within graph datasets. Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a popular deep neural architecture, demonstrating significant performance in various graph-based analysis and learning problems. Explicitly, within the manifold paradigm, the graph is naturally considered as a topological object (e.g., the topological properties of the given graph can be represented by the edge weights). Therefore, integrating TDA and GNN is considered an excellent combination. Many well-known studies have recently presented the effectiveness of TDA-assisted GNN-based architectures in dealing with complex graph-based data representation analysis and learning problems. Motivated by the successes of recent research, we present systematic literature about this nascent and promising research direction in this article, which includes general taxonomy, preliminaries, and recently proposed state-of-the-art topology-driven GNN models and perspectives.

As the number of scientific publications continues to increase at a dizzying rate, researchers face challenges related to spending too much time and effort searching for appropriate papers to cite in their work. Citation recommendation models have thus been developed to automatically generate a list of relevant papers for a specific text passage, thus helping to reduce the workload for scientists and contribute to better-quality research. Consequently, this research direction has recently attracted significant interest in the scientific community. However, the current citation recommendation models still focus primarily on the citation context and do not adequately address the metadata of papers, such as the citation links, publication time, and venue. To overcome these problems, in this study, we propose the SciBERT-GraphSAGE which is a hybrid deep learning-based model for recommending a list of academic papers by considering both the citation context and this article’s metadata. Our model has two important components: 1) SciBERT for text data representation learning and 2) GraphSAGE for learning the representations of this article’s citation links. We validate the effectiveness of our model on three benchmark datasets: 1) FullTextPeerRead; 2) ACL; and 3) RefSeer. The results from experiments demonstrate that our novel SciBERT-GraphSAGE model outperforms previous advanced models in terms of Recall@K, mean reciprocal rank (MRR), and mean average precision (MAP).

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) in crowded environments presents a challenging problem in motion planning, aiming to find collision-free paths for all agents in the system. MAPF finds a wide range of applications in various domains, including aerial swarms, autonomous warehouse robotics, and self-driving vehicles. Current approaches to MAPF generally fall into two main categories: centralized and decentralized planning. Centralized planning suffers from the curse of dimensionality when the number of agents or states increases and thus does not scale well in large and complex environments. On the other hand, decentralized planning enables agents to engage in real-time path planning within a partially observable environment, demonstrating implicit coordination. However, they suffer from slow convergence and performance degradation in dense environments. In this paper, we introduce CRAMP, a novel crowd-aware decentralized reinforcement learning approach to address this problem by enabling efficient local communication among agents via Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), facilitating situational awareness and decision-making capabilities in congested environments. We test CRAMP on simulated environments and demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art decentralized methods for MAPF on various metrics. CRAMP improves the solution quality up to 59% measured in makespan and collision count, and up to 35% improvement in success rate in comparison to previous methods.

In recent years, heterogeneous network/graph representation learning/embedding (HNE) has drawn tremendous attentions from research communities in multiple disciplines. HNE has shown its outstanding performances in various networked data analysis and mining tasks. In fact, most of real-world information networks in multiple fields can be modelled as the heterogeneous information networks (HIN). Thus, the HNE-based techniques can sufficiently capture rich-structured and semantic latent features from the given information network in order to facilitate for different task-driven learning tasks. This is considered as fundamental success of HNE-based approach in comparing with previous traditional homogeneous network/graph based embedding techniques. However, there are recent studies have also demonstrated that the heterogeneous network/graph modelling and embedding through graph neural network (GNN) is not usually reliable. This challenge is original come from the fact that most of real-world heterogeneous networks are considered as incomplete and normally contain a large number of feature noises. Therefore, multiple attempts have proposed recently to overcome this limitation. Within this approach, the meta-path-based heterogeneous graph-structured latent features and GNN-based parameters are jointly learnt and optimized during the embedding process. However, this integrated GNN and heterogeneous graph structure (HGS) learning approach still suffered a challenge of effectively parameterizing and fusing different graph-structured latent features from both GNN- and HGS-based sides into better task-driven friendly and noise-reduced embedding spaces. Therefore, in this paper we proposed a novel attention-supplemented heterogeneous graph structure embedding approach, called as: AGSE. Our proposed AGSE model supports to not only achieve the combined rich heterogeneous structural and GNN-based aggregated node representations but also transform achieved node embeddings into noise-reduced and task-driven friendly embedding space. Extensive experiments in benchmark heterogeneous networked datasets for node classification task showed the effectiveness of our proposed AGSE model in comparing with state-of-the-art network embedding baselines.

We present a novel optimization algorithm called DroNeRF for the autonomous positioning of monocular camera drones around an object for real-time 3D reconstruction using only a few images. Neural Radiance Fields, or NeRF, is a novel view synthesis technique used to generate new views of an object or scene from a set of input images. Using drones in conjunction with NeRF provides a unique and dynamic way to generate novel views of a scene, especially with limited scene capabilities of restricted movements. Our approach focuses on calculating optimized pose for individual drones while solely depending on the object geometry without using any external localization system. The unique camera positioning during the data capturing phase significantly impacts the quality of the 3D model. To evaluate the quality of our generated novel views, we compute different perceptual metrics like the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM). Our work demonstrates the benefit of using an optimal placement of various drones with limited mobility to generate perceptually better results.

A key aspect of driving a road vehicle is to interact with other road users, assess their intentions and make riskaware tactical decisions. An intuitive approach to enabling an intelligent automated driving system would be incorporating some aspects of human driving behavior. To this end, we propose a novel driving framework for egocentric views based on spatio-temporal traffic graphs. The traffic graphs model not only the spatial interactions amongst the road users but also their individual intentions through temporally associated message passing. We leverage a spatio-temporal graph convolutional network (ST-GCN) to train the graph edges. These edges are formulated using parameterized functions of 3D positions and scene-aware appearance features of road agents. Along with tactical behavior prediction, it is crucial to evaluate the risk-assessing ability of the proposed framework. We claim that our framework learns risk-aware representations by improving on the task of risk object identification, especially in identifying objects with vulnerable interactions like pedestrians and cyclists.

Recent studies on heterogeneous information network (HIN) embedding-based recommendations have encountered challenges. These challenges are related to the data heterogeneity of the associated unstructured attribute or content (e.g., text-based summary/description) of users and items in the context of HIN. In order to address these challenges, in this article, we propose a novel approach of semantic-aware HIN embedding-based recommendation, called SemHE4Rec. In our proposed SemHE4Rec model, we define two embedding techniques for efficiently learning the representations of both users and items in the context of HIN. These rich-structural user and item representations are then used to facilitate the matrix factorization (MF) process. The first embedding technique is a traditional co-occurrence representation learning (CoRL) approach which aims to learn the co-occurrence of structural features of users and items. These structural features are represented for their interconnections in terms of meta-paths. In order to do that, we adopt the well-known meta-path-based random walk strategy and heterogeneous Skip-gram architecture. The second embedding approach is a semantic-aware representation learning (SRL) method. The SRL embedding technique is designed to focus on capturing the unstructured semantic relations between users and item content for the recommendation task. Finally, all the learned representations of users and items are then jointly combined and optimized while integrating with the extended MF for the recommendation task. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SemHE4Rec in comparison with the recent state-of-the-art HIN embedding-based recommendation techniques, and reveal that the joint text-based and co-occurrence-based representation learning can help to improve the recommendation performance.

The spectral and spatial resolutions of modern optical Earth observation data are continuously increasing. To fully utilize the data, integrate them with other information sources, and create applications relevant to real-world problems, extensive training data are required. We present TAIGA, an open dataset including continuous and categorical forestry data, accompanied by airborne hyperspectral imagery with a pixel size of 0.7 m. The dataset contains over 70 million labeled pixels belonging to more than 600 forest stands. To establish a baseline on TAIGA dataset for multitask learning, we trained and validated a convolutional neural network to simultaneously retrieve 13 forest variables. Due to the size of the imagery, the training and testing sets were independent, with strictly no overlap for patches up to$45\times 45$pixels. Our retrieval results show that including both spectral and textural information improves the accuracy of mapping key boreal forest structural characteristics, compared with an earlier study including only spectral information from the same image. TAIGA responds to the increased availability of hyperspectral and very high resolution imagery, and includes the forestry variables relevant for forestry and environmental applications. We propose the dataset as a new benchmark for spatial–spectral methods that overcomes the limitations of widely used small-scale hyperspectral datasets.

Recent advances in deep learning have tremendously leveraged the performance of network representation learning (NRL). Multiple deep learning-based NRL models have been proposed recently to effectively handling primitive tasks of information network analysis and mining (INAM) domain, including link prediction (LP). LP is considered as an important one due to its multiple applications in many disciplines. In the recent few years, LP in dynamic networks has attracted a lot of attention from researchers to propose novel algorithms for better capturing both rich structural and evolutional information of complex information networks (INs). However, recent models are mainly concentrated on preserving the sequential representations of a given network over time. They have largely ignored other important structural features, such as: intracommunity which contributes to the creation of links between network nodes. In this article, we propose a novel community-driven dynamic NRL technique upon the RNN+GCN framework, called: ComGCN. Specifically, the ComGCN model is a combination of microscopic (node embedding-based) and mesoscopic (intracommunity-based) dynamic network embedding approach which enable effectively handling the LP problem in context of dynamism. Extensive experiments on real-world dynamic networks demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed model compared with recent state-of-the-art baselines.

Link prediction on heterogeneous information network (HIN) is considered as a challenge problem due to the complexity and diversity in types of nodes and links. Currently, there are remained challenges of meta-path-based link prediction in HIN. Previous works of link prediction in HIN via network embedding approach are mainly focused on exploiting features of node rather than existing relations in forms of meta-paths between nodes. In fact, predicting the existence of new links between non-linked nodes is absolutely inconvincible. Moreover, recent HIN-based embedding models also lack of thorough evaluations on the topic similarity between text-based nodes along given meta-paths. To tackle these challenges, in this paper, we proposed a novel approach of topic-driven multiple meta-path-based HIN representation learning framework, namely W-MMP2Vec. Our model leverages the quality of node representations by combining multiple meta-paths as well as calculating the topic similarity weight for each meta-path during the processes of network embedding learning in content-based HINs. To validate our approach, we apply W-TMP2Vec model in solving several link prediction tasks in both content-based and non-content-based HINs (DBLP, IMDB and BlogCatalog). The experimental outputs demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed model which outperforms recent state-of-the-art HIN representation learning models.

In the United States, the country with the highest confirmed COVID-19 infection cases, a nationwide social distancing protocol has been implemented by the President. Following the closure of the University of Washington on March 7th, more than 1000 colleges and universities in the United States have cancelled in-person classes and campus activities, impacting millions of students. This paper aims to discover the social implications of this unprecedented disruption in our interactive society regarding both the general public and higher education populations by mining people's opinions on social media. We discover several topics embedded in a large number of COVID-19 tweets that represent the most central issues related to the pandemic, which are of great concerns for both college students and the general public. Moreover, we find significant differences between these two groups of Twitter users with respect to the sentiments they expressed towards the COVID-19 issues. To our best knowledge, this is the first social media-based study which focuses on the college student community's demographics and responses to prevalent social issues during a major crisis.

Heterogeneous information network (HIN) are becoming popular across multiple applications in forms of complex large-scaled networked data such as social networks, bibliographic networks, biological networks, etc. Recently, information network embedding (INE) has aroused tremendously interests from researchers due to its effectiveness in information network analysis and mining tasks. From recent views of INE, community is considered as the mesoscopic preserving network’s structure which can be combined with traditional approach of network’s node proximities (microscopic structure preserving) to leverage the quality of network’s representation. Most of contemporary INE models, like as: HIN2Vec, Metapath2Vec, HINE, etc. mainly concentrate on microscopic network structure preserving and ignore the mesoscopic (intra-community) structure of HIN. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach of topic-driven meta-path-based embedding, namely W-Com2Vec (Weighted intra-community to vector). Our proposed W-Com2Vec model enables to capture richer semantic of node representation by applying the meta-path-based community-aware, node proximity preserving and topic similarity evaluation at the same time during the process of network embedding. We demonstrate comprehensive empirical studies on our proposed W-Com2Vec model with several real-world HINs. Experimental results show W-Com2Vec outperforms recent state-of-the-art INE models in solving primitive network analysis and mining tasks.