Chengyang Li

Ruihua Han, Shuai Wang, Shuaijun Wang et al.

Navigating a nonholonomic robot in a cluttered, unknown environment requires accurate perception and precise motion control for real-time collision avoidance. This paper presents NeuPAN: a real-time, highly accurate, map-free, easy-to-deploy, and environment-invariant robot motion planner. Leveraging a tightly coupled perception-to-control framework, NeuPAN has two key innovations compared to existing approaches: 1) it directly maps raw point cloud data to a latent distance feature space for collision-free motion generation, avoiding error propagation from the perception to control pipeline; 2) it is interpretable from an end-to-end model-based learning perspective. The crux of NeuPAN is solving an end-to-end mathematical model with numerous point-level constraints using a plug-and-play (PnP) proximal alternating-minimization network (PAN), incorporating neurons in the loop. This allows NeuPAN to generate real-time, physically interpretable motions. It seamlessly integrates data and knowledge engines, and its network parameters can be fine-tuned via backpropagation. We evaluate NeuPAN on a ground mobile robot, a wheel-legged robot, and an autonomous vehicle, in extensive simulated and real-world environments. Results demonstrate that NeuPAN outperforms existing baselines in terms of accuracy, efficiency, robustness, and generalization capabilities across various environments, including the cluttered sandbox, office, corridor, and parking lot. We show that NeuPAN works well in unknown and unstructured environments with arbitrarily shaped objects, transforming impassable paths into passable ones.

Wanli Ni, Hui Tian, Shuai Wang et al.

Federated split learning (FedSL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling collaborative intelligence in industrial Internet of Things (IoT) systems, particularly in smart factories where data privacy, communication efficiency, and device heterogeneity are critical concerns. In this article, we present a comprehensive study of FedSL frameworks tailored for resource-constrained robots in industrial scenarios. We compare synchronous, asynchronous, hierarchical, and heterogeneous FedSL frameworks in terms of workflow, scalability, adaptability, and limitations under dynamic industrial conditions. Furthermore, we systematically categorize token fusion strategies into three paradigms: input-level (pre-fusion), intermediate-level (intra-fusion), and output-level (post-fusion), and summarize their respective strengths in industrial applications. We also provide adaptive optimization techniques to enhance the efficiency and feasibility of FedSL implementation, including model compression, split layer selection, computing frequency allocation, and wireless resource management. Simulation results validate the performance of these frameworks under industrial detection scenarios. Finally, we outline open issues and research directions of FedSL in future smart manufacturing systems.

Shivendra Bhardwaj, Abbas Ghaddar, Ahmad Rashid et al.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is extensively used to compress and deploy large pre-trained language models on edge devices for real-world applications. However, one neglected area of research is the impact of noisy (corrupted) labels on KD. We present, to the best of our knowledge, the first study on KD with noisy labels in Natural Language Understanding (NLU). We document the scope of the problem and present two methods to mitigate the impact of label noise. Experiments on the GLUE benchmark show that our methods are effective even under high noise levels. Nevertheless, our results indicate that more research is necessary to cope with label noise under the KD.