In this paper, we introduce a novel temporal convolutional shrinkage network to enhance feature learning from noisy speech signals. Taking into account the non-stationary nature of speech signals, we introduce an approach that integrates time-varying soft thresholding with a temporal convolutional network. This enhancement aims to improve the robustness of the KWS model against noise. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in noise suppression, resulting in an improved performance of the KWS system in noisy environments. Furthermore, an ablation study provides verification of the efficacy of the proposed shrinkage layer and the soft thresholding processing.

6D object pose estimation plays a crucial role in robot grasping and manipulation. However, the prevalent methods for 6D object pose estimation heavily rely on 6D annotated data to train deep neural networks, which poses challenges due to the difficulty in obtaining sufficient pose annotations. To address this limitation, this paper presents a self-supervised pose estimation method based on a novel pixelwise weighted dense fusion architecture. This method allows for direct learning from unannotated RGB-D data facilitated by an Iterative Annotation Resolver. Furthermore, a self-supervised pose refinement method based on joint loss is proposed to enhance the pose estimation accuracy. This refinement method employs a differentiable renderer to construct joint optimization constraints. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves a level of pose estimation accuracy that closely rivals that of supervised methods.

Answering natural language questions on knowledge bases (KBs) has been a research hotspot. Great efforts have been made on complex question answering, due to urgent demands. Given a complex question, existing approaches mostly transform it into query graphs via semantic parsing and pick the best one for result identification. However, these approaches suffer from the issue of excessive low-quality query graphs in expressing a complex question. To address this issue, we propose a comprehensive approach to generating query graphs. We first introduce a model, which leverages contrastive learning as well as features fusion, for core chains reasoning. We next propose a semantic-aware model along with an enhancement strategy to identify and associate constraints on a core chain. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show superiority of our approach.

Object pose estimation has extensive applications in various industrial scenarios. However, the heavy reliance on dense 6-D annotation and textured object models has become a significant obstacle to the widespread industrial application of 6-D object pose estimation methods. In this work, we presentSS-Pose, a self-supervised learning framework for estimating 6-D object poses without annotated 6-D data and textured model.SS-Poseproposes thecoordinate system datum reinitializerstage to dynamically establish a sequence-level pose representation datum, and thetemporal–spatial constraint resolvermodule to obtain the self-supervised learning target through interframe constraints. We introduce a one-shotcross-coordinate transformationthat establishes the relationship between the 6-D representation and the object poses, which can be further utilized in real-world tasks. We evaluated the proposedSS-Poseon the challenging YCB-Video dataset and texture-less T-LESS dataset. Our approach achieves competitive performance with significantly lower data dependency, making it suitable for visual perception in industrial applications.

Multi-label text classification (MLTC) is an important task in the field of natural language processing (NLP). Suffering from limited input length, most existing models learn text representation and label representation separately, leading to the overlook of correlations between texts and labels. To this end, we introduce a comprehensive model for the MLTC task. Under the same representation space, our model, which is equipped with Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) layer, attention mechanism, and contrastive learning objective, learns representations of texts and labels jointly. To tackle the issue caused by the input length limitation, we develop a two-stage label reduction method via the application of label merging and association. Our method’s effectiveness is validated through extensive experiments on various MLTC datasets, unraveling the intricate correlations between texts and labels.

Lower Limb Exoskeletons (LLE) have received considerable interest in strength augmentation, rehabilitation, and walking assistance scenarios. For strength augmentation, LLE is expected to have the capability of reducing metabolic energy. However, the energy for adjusting Center of Gravity (CoG) is a main part of the total energy consumed during walking. This paper proposes a novel Human-exoskeleton Cooperative Balance (HCB) strategy which gives assistive torques balance ability and combine with the direction selected by the pilot to achieve balance walking of human-exoskeleton systems. In which, a Dynamic Torque Primitive Model (DTPM) is designed to plan a bionic assistive torque, and the balance parameters obtained by an Inverted Pendulum Model (IPM) is superimposed on it. Finally, the performance improved by the HCB strategy can break the limitation of traditional strategies and substantially increase the efficiency of assistance. We demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed HCB strategy on the HUman-powered Augmentation Lower EXoskeleton (HUALEX) system. Experimental results indicate that the proposed HCB is more efficient than traditional strategies.

Many methods in mobile robotics usually utilize current sensor measurement to evaluate the localization performance of robots, for example in scan matching and particle filter methods. This immediately detecting methodology tend to cause a problem that a well-localization robot obtains a poor sensor measurement, the robot may mistake momentary observation noise for a localization failure. In this paper, we propose a new robot localization fault detection method for resolving this problem. We model robot localization fault detection as a sequential decision-making problem, where the decision of detecting a localization failure is based on a long-term sensor measurements. We employ two parameters of false-positive and false-negative observation error probabilities, which can eliminate the influence of noisy observations. Further, the proposed method derives Bayesian update equations for the integration of a long-term observations and presents an analytic formula representing the belief function of the reliability of localization results. Experimental studies validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Visual Query Answering (VQA) is of great significance in offering people convenience: one can raise a question for details of objects, or high-level understanding about the scene, over an image. This paper proposes a novel method to address the VQA problem. In contrast to prior works, our method that targets single scene VQA, replies on graph-based techniques and involves reasoning. In a nutshell, our approach is centered on three graphs. The first graph, referred to as inference graph G_I, is constructed via learning over labeled data. The other two graphs, referred to as query graph Q and entity-attribute graph EAG, are generated from natural language query NLQ and image Img, that are issued from users, respectively. As EAG often does not take sufficient information to answer Q, we develop techniques to infer missing information of EAG with G_I. Based on EAG and Q, we provide techniques to find matches of Q in EAG, as the answer of NLQ in Img. Unlike commonly used VQA methods that are based on end-to-end neural networks, our graph-based method shows well-designed reasoning capability, and thus is highly interpretable. We also create a dataset on soccer match (Soccer-VQA) with rich annotations. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art method and has high potential for future investigation.