Long-horizon contact-rich manipulation has long been a challenging problem, as it requires reasoning over both discrete contact modes and continuous object motion. We introduce Implicit Contact Diffuser (ICD), a diffusion-based model that generates a sequence of neural descriptors that specify a series of contact relationships between the object and the environment. This sequence is then used as guidance for an MPC method to accomplish a given task. The key advantage of this approach is that the latent descriptors provide more taskrelevant guidance to MPC, helping to avoid local minima for contact-rich manipulation tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that ICD outperforms baselines on complex, long-horizon, contact-rich manipulation tasks, such as cable routing and notebook folding. Additionally, our experiments also indicate that ICD can generalize a target contact relationship to a different environment. More visualizations can be found on our website https://implicit-contact-diffuser.github.io.

Dynamic events, such as machine fault and rush order insertion, are fairly common in the job shop scheduling, which may lead to significant delay in order delivery and low production efficiency. Under such circumstance, it is urgent to consider more perspectives in the scheduling, such as delay time and equipment load rate. In this article, a dynamic many-objective flexible job shop scheduling problem (DMaFJSP) is founded to simultaneously optimize the completion time, delay time, total equipment load and energy consumption. Canonical many-objective optimization algorithms are seeing difficulties in maintaining population diversity and enduring poor adaptability in dynamic scheduling problems. The paper proposes a two-stage individual feedback non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-III (TSIF-NSGA-III), where a new population diversity strategy and an individual feedback strategy are added to expand the global search faculty and stronger dynamic adaptability. Numerical study in many-objective problem and dynamic many-objective problem are conducted. The final results illustrate that the proposed algorithm can with effect dispose of the DMaFJSP.Note to Practitioners—This paper was motivated by the flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP) in practical dynamic situations. In the actual production procedure, however, FJSP is a more challenging issue. Not only operation sequencing and machine allocation matters, but also uncertain factors in the environment, such as machine fault, rush order insertion, etc., are important. In addition, the majority of current researchers formulate the FJSP simply focusing on maximum completion time. However, low carbon and high efficient manufacturing calls for more objectives. In this paper, two dynamic incidents, machine stoppage and rush order insertion, are considered. In addition, the model of DMaFJSP is established with many objectives such as total energy consumption, completion time, equipment load and delay time. To resolve foregoing problems, this article proposes a TSIF-NSGA-III algorithm, which adopts a diversity generation strategy and an individual feedback strategy to strengthen the search ability and dynamic adaptability of this algorithm. Preliminary simulation outcomes illuminate that this algorithm has certain advantages. In addition, the algorithm can also be applied to other multi-objective workshop scheduling problems, such as mixed flow workshop, distributed workshop, etc.

Manipulation of articulated and deformable objects can be difficult due to their compliant and under-actuated nature. Unexpected disturbances can cause the object to deviate from a predicted state, making it necessary to use Model-Predictive Control (MPC) methods to plan motion. However, these methods need a short planning horizon to be practical. Thus, MPC is ill-suited for long-horizon manipulation tasks due to local minima. In this paper, we present a diffusion-based method that guides an MPC method to accomplish long-horizon manipulation tasks by dynamically specifying sequences of subgoals for the MPC to follow. Our method, called Subgoal Diffuser, generates subgoals in a coarse-to-fine manner, producing sparse subgoals when the task is easily accomplished by MPC and more dense subgoals when the MPC method needs more guidance. The density of subgoals is determined dynamically based on a learned estimate of reachability, and subgoals are distributed to focus on challenging parts of the task. We evaluate our method on two robot manipulation tasks and find it improves the planning performance of an MPC method, and also outperforms prior diffusion-based methods. More visualizations and results can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/subgoal-diffuser-mpc

We propose a method for improving the prediction accuracy of learned robot dynamics models on out-of-distribution (OOD) states. We achieve this by leveraging two key sources of structure often present in robot dynamics: 1) sparsity, i.e., some components of the state may not affect the dynamics, and 2) physical limits on the set of possible motions, in the form of nonholonomic constraints. Crucially, we do not assume this structure is known a priori, and instead learn it from data. We use contrastive learning to obtain a distance pseudometric that uncovers the sparsity pattern in the dynamics, and use it to reduce the input space when learning the dynamics. We then learn the unknown constraint manifold by approximating the normal space of possible motions from the data, which we use to train a Gaussian process (GP) representation of the constraint manifold. We evaluate our approach on a physical differential-drive robot and a simulated quadrotor, showing improved prediction accuracy on OOD data relative to baselines.

Stem cell culture in vitro is essential for research in cell biology, drug toxicity and translational studies. In recent years, there has been a surge in the development of deep learning-based object detection algorithms tailored for image analysis of stem cell culture. However, many of these algorithms fall short in terms of performance and interpretability. To address these challenges, we present StemCellDet, an innovative multimodal-based method for stem cell detection. By harnessing the power of the pretrained CLIP model, StemCellDet uniquely encodes descriptions of stem cell categories into text embeddings, which are then synchronized with image embeddings. This synchronization enhances the model’s ability to identify critical features for accurate stem cell model categorization. Furthermore, by integrating knowledge distillation and introducing our proposed Semantic Fusion Module (SFM), StemCellDet can adeptly identify stem cell culture categories that were not present during its training phase using only their textual descriptions. Our experiments highlight StemCellDet’s robust detection capabilities and its advantages in terms of accuracy and generalizability.

High-throughput single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data processing pipelines integrate multiple modules to transform raw scRNA-seq data to gene expression matrices, including barcode processing, sequence quality control, genome alignment and transcript quantification. With the rapid growth in data volume, the speed of scRNA-seq data processing pipeline has become a major bottleneck to large-scale scRNA-seq studies. We present scSparkXMBD1(denoted as scSpark), a cloud computing based scRNA-seq data processing pipeline. By leveraging the in-memory computing capability of Apache Spark, scSpark significantly improves the processing speed of scRNA-seq data, and achieves around 5-20 times faster than the state-of-the-art processing pipelines under the same CPU core consumption. In addition, thanks to the inherent scalability of Spark in a cloud computing environment, scSpark can further reduce the processing time for a typical scRNA-seq dataset (e.g., 640 million reads) from hours to minutes when multiple computer nodes (e.g., 16) are used. Biological evaluation also confirmed that the results generated by scSpark are highly consistent with existing scRNA-seq data processing pipelines.1XMBD refers to Xiamen Big Data, which is a biomedical open software initiative in the National Institute for Data Science in Health and Medicine, Xiamen University, China

Tax evasion is a serious economic problem for many countries, as it can undermine the government's tax system and lead to an unfair business competition environment. Recent research has applied data analytics techniques to analyze and detect tax evasion behaviors of individual taxpayers. However, they have failed to support the analysis and exploration of the related party transaction tax evasion (RPTTE) behaviors (e.g., transfer pricing), where a group of taxpayers is involved. In this paper, we present TaxThemis, an interactive visual analytics system to help tax officers mine and explore suspicious tax evasion groups through analyzing heterogeneous tax-related data. A taxpayer network is constructed and fused with the respective trade network to detect suspicious RPTTE groups. Rich visualizations are designed to facilitate the exploration and investigation of suspicious transactions between related taxpayers with profit and topological data analysis. Specifically, we propose a calendar heatmap with a carefully-designed encoding scheme to intuitively show the evidence of transferring revenue through related party transactions. We demonstrate the usefulness and effectiveness of TaxThemis through two case studies on real-world tax-related data and interviews with domain experts.

In this demonstration, we present ATTENet, a novel visual analytic system for detecting and explaining suspicious affiliated-transaction-based tax evasion (ATTE) groups. First, the system constructs a taxpayer interest interacted network, which contains economic behaviors and social relationships between taxpayers. Then, the system combines basic features and structure features of each group in the network with network embedding method structure2Vec, and then detects suspicious ATTE groups with random forest algorithm. Last, to explore and explain the detection results, the system provides an ATTENet visualization with three coordinated views and interactive tools. We demonstrate ATTENet on a non-confidential dataset which contains two years of real tax data obtained by our cooperative tax authorities to verify the usefulness of our system.

Customer volume prediction, which predicts the volume from a customer source to a service place, is a very important technique for location selection, market investigation, and other related applications. Most of traditional methods only make use of partial information for either supervised or unsupervised modeling, which cannot well integrate overall available knowledge. In this paper, we propose a method titled GR-NMF for jointly modeling both implicit correlations hidden inside customer volumes and explicit geographical knowledge via an integrated probabilistic framework. The effectiveness of GR-NMF in coupling all-round knowledge is verified over a real-life outpatient dataset under different scenarios. GR-NMF shows particularly evident advantages to all baselines in location selection with the cold-start challenge.