Yu He

Diego Paez-Granados, Yujie He, David Gonon et al.

Autonomous navigation in highly populated areas remains a challenging task for robots because of the difficulty in guaranteeing safe interactions with pedestrians in unstructured situations. In this work, we present a crowd navigation control framework that delivers continuous obstacle avoidance and post-contact control evaluated on an autonomous personal mobility vehicle. We propose evaluation metrics for accounting efficiency, controller response and crowd interactions in natural crowds. We report the results of over 110 trials in different crowd types: sparse, flows, and mixed traffic, with low- (< 0.15 ppsm), mid- (< 0.65 ppsm), and high- (< 1 ppsm) pedestrian densities. We present comparative results between two low-level obstacle avoidance methods and a baseline of shared control. Results show a 10% drop in relative time to goal on the highest density tests, and no other efficiency metric decrease. Moreover, autonomous navigation showed to be comparable to shared-control navigation with a lower relative jerk and significantly higher fluency in commands indicating high compatibility with the crowd. We conclude that the reactive controller fulfils a necessary task of fast and continuous adaptation to crowd navigation, and it should be coupled with high-level planners for environmental and situational awareness.

Vivek Gupta, Pranshu Kandoi, Mahek Bhavesh Vora et al.

Semi-structured data, such as Infobox tables, often include temporal information about entities, either implicitly or explicitly. Can current NLP systems reason about such information in semi-structured tables? To tackle this question, we introduce the task of temporal question answering on semi-structured tables. We present a dataset, TempTabQA, which comprises 11,454 question-answer pairs extracted from 1,208 Wikipedia Infobox tables spanning more than 90 distinct domains. Using this dataset, we evaluate several state-of-the-art models for temporal reasoning. We observe that even the top-performing LLMs lag behind human performance by more than 13.5 F1 points. Given these results, our dataset has the potential to serve as a challenging benchmark to improve the temporal reasoning capabilities of NLP models.

Gary Song Yan, Yusen Zhang, Jinyu Zhao et al.

In this pioneering study, we introduce StyleWallfacer, a groundbreaking unified training and inference framework, which not only addresses various issues encountered in the style transfer process of traditional methods but also unifies the framework for different tasks. This framework is designed to revolutionize the field by enabling artist level style transfer and text driven stylization. First, we propose a semantic-based style injection method that uses BLIP to generate text descriptions strictly aligned with the semantics of the style image in CLIP space. By leveraging a large language model to remove style-related descriptions from these descriptions, we create a semantic gap. This gap is then used to fine-tune the model, enabling efficient and drift-free injection of style knowledge. Second, we propose a data augmentation strategy based on human feedback, incorporating high-quality samples generated early in the fine-tuning process into the training set to facilitate progressive learning and significantly reduce its overfitting. Finally, we design a training-free triple diffusion process using the fine-tuned model, which manipulates the features of self-attention layers in a manner similar to the cross-attention mechanism. Specifically, in the generation process, the key and value of the content-related process are replaced with those of the style-related process to inject style while maintaining text control over the model. We also introduce query preservation to mitigate disruptions to the original content. Under such a design, we have achieved high-quality image-driven style transfer and text-driven stylization, delivering artist-level style transfer results while preserving the original image content. Moreover, we achieve image color editing during the style transfer process for the first time.