Bo Liu

Akarsh Kumar, Bo Liu, Risto Miikkulainen et al.

Evolutionary algorithms are sensitive to the mutation rate (MR); no single value of this parameter works well across domains. Self-adaptive MR approaches have been proposed but they tend to be brittle: Sometimes they decay the MR to zero, thus halting evolution. To make self-adaptive MR robust, this paper introduces the Group Elite Selection of Mutation Rates (GESMR) algorithm. GESMR co-evolves a population of solutions and a population of MRs, such that each MR is assigned to a group of solutions. The resulting best mutational change in the group, instead of average mutational change, is used for MR selection during evolution, thus avoiding the vanishing MR problem. With the same number of function evaluations and with almost no overhead, GESMR converges faster and to better solutions than previous approaches on a wide range of continuous test optimization problems. GESMR also scales well to high-dimensional neuroevolution for supervised image-classification tasks and for reinforcement learning control tasks. Remarkably, GESMR produces MRs that are optimal in the long-term, as demonstrated through a comprehensive look-ahead grid search. Thus, GESMR and its theoretical and empirical analysis demonstrate how self-adaptation can be harnessed to improve performance in several applications of evolutionary computation.

Bo Liu, Normand Paquin

Motion capture is a widely-used technology in robotics research thanks to its precise posi tional measurements with real-time performance. This paper presents ViconMAVLink, a cross-platform open-source software tool that provides indoor positioning services to networked robots. ViconMAVLink converts Vicon motion capture data into proper pose and motion data formats and send localization information to robots using the MAVLink protocol. The software is a convenient tool for mobile robotics researchers to conduct experiments in a controlled indoor environment.

Di Chang, Mingdeng Cao, Yichun Shi et al. · stanford

Editing images with instructions to reflect non-rigid motions, camera viewpoint shifts, object deformations, human articulations, and complex interactions, poses a challenging yet underexplored problem in computer vision. Existing approaches and datasets predominantly focus on static scenes or rigid transformations, limiting their capacity to handle expressive edits involving dynamic motion. To address this gap, we introduce ByteMorph, a comprehensive framework for instruction-based image editing with an emphasis on non-rigid motions. ByteMorph comprises a large-scale dataset, ByteMorph-6M, and a strong baseline model built upon the Diffusion Transformer (DiT), named ByteMorpher. ByteMorph-6M includes over 6 million high-resolution image editing pairs for training, along with a carefully curated evaluation benchmark ByteMorph-Bench. Both capture a wide variety of non-rigid motion types across diverse environments, human figures, and object categories. The dataset is constructed using motion-guided data generation, layered compositing techniques, and automated captioning to ensure diversity, realism, and semantic coherence. We further conduct a comprehensive evaluation of recent instruction-based image editing methods from both academic and commercial domains.

Wenhao Chi, Haiping Liu, Hongqiao Dong et al.

In the field of non-invasive medical imaging, radiomic features are utilized to measure tumor characteristics. However, these features can be affected by the techniques used to discretize the images, ultimately impacting the accuracy of diagnosis. To investigate the influence of various image discretization methods on diagnosis, it is common practice to evaluate multiple discretization strategies individually. This approach often leads to redundant and time-consuming tasks such as training predictive models and fine-tuning hyperparameters separately. This study examines the feasibility of employing multi-task Bayesian optimization to accelerate the hyperparameters search for classifying benign and malignant pulmonary nodules using RBF SVM. Our findings suggest that multi-task Bayesian optimization significantly accelerates the search for hyperparameters in comparison to a single-task approach. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first investigation to utilize multi-task Bayesian optimization in a critical medical context.

Yu Sha, Johannes Faber, Shuiping Gou et al.

Valves are widely used in industrial and domestic pipeline systems. However, during their operation, they may suffer from the occurrence of the cavitation, which can cause loud noise, vibration and damage to the internal components of the valve. Therefore, monitoring the flow status inside valves is significantly beneficial to prevent the additional cost induced by cavitation. In this paper, a novel acoustic signal cavitation detection framework--based on XGBoost with adaptive selection feature engineering--is proposed. Firstly, a data augmentation method with non-overlapping sliding window (NOSW) is developed to solve small-sample problem involved in this study. Then, the each segmented piece of time-domain acoustic signal is transformed by fast Fourier transform (FFT) and its statistical features are extracted to be the input to the adaptive selection feature engineering (ASFE) procedure, where the adaptive feature aggregation and feature crosses are performed. Finally, with the selected features the XGBoost algorithm is trained for cavitation detection and tested on valve acoustic signal data provided by Samson AG (Frankfurt). Our method has achieved state-of-the-art results. The prediction performance on the binary classification (cavitation and no-cavitation) and the four-class classification (cavitation choked flow, constant cavitation, incipient cavitation and no-cavitation) are satisfactory and outperform the traditional XGBoost by 4.67% and 11.11% increase of the accuracy.