Zichao Shen

Han Cui, Shu Zhong, Jiacheng Wu et al.

Millimetre-wave (mmWave) radar has emerged as an attractive and cost-effective alternative for human activity sensing compared to traditional camera-based systems. mmWave radars are also non-intrusive, providing better protection for user privacy. However, as a Radio Frequency (RF) based technology, mmWave radars rely on capturing reflected signals from objects, making them more prone to noise compared to cameras. This raises an intriguing question for the deep learning community: Can we develop more effective point set-based deep learning methods for such attractive sensors? To answer this question, our work, termed MiliPoint, delves into this idea by providing a large-scale, open dataset for the community to explore how mmWave radars can be utilised for human activity recognition. Moreover, MiliPoint stands out as it is larger in size than existing datasets, has more diverse human actions represented, and encompasses all three key tasks in human activity recognition. We have also established a range of point-based deep neural networks such as DGCNN, PointNet++ and PointTransformer, on MiliPoint, which can serve to set the ground baseline for further development.

Zichao Shen, Neil Howard, Jose Nunez-Yanez

This paper investigates the energy savings that near-subthreshold processors can obtain in edge AI applications and proposes strategies to improve them while maintaining the accuracy of the application. The selected processors deploy adaptive voltage scaling techniques in which the frequency and voltage levels of the processor core are determined at the run-time. In these systems, embedded RAM and flash memory size is typically limited to less than 1 megabyte to save power. This limited memory imposes restrictions on the complexity of the neural networks model that can be mapped to these devices and the required trade-offs between accuracy and battery life. To address these issues, we propose and evaluate alternative 'big-little' neural network strategies to improve battery life while maintaining prediction accuracy. The strategies are applied to a human activity recognition application selected as a demonstrator that shows that compared to the original network, the best configurations obtain an energy reduction measured at 80% while maintaining the original level of inference accuracy.

Zichao Shen, Chen Gao, Jiaqi Yuan et al.

Embodied task planning requires agents to produce executable actions in a close-loop manner within the environment. With progressively improving capabilities of LLMs in task decomposition, planning, and generalization, current embodied task planning methods adopt LLM-based architecture.However, existing LLM-based planners remain limited in three aspects, i.e., fixed planning paradigms, lack of action sequence constraints, and error-agnostic. In this work, we propose SDA-PLANNER, enabling an adaptive planning paradigm, state-dependency aware and error-aware mechanisms for comprehensive embodied task planning. Specifically, SDA-PLANNER introduces a State-Dependency Graph to explicitly model action preconditions and effects, guiding the dynamic revision. To handle execution error, it employs an error-adaptive replanning strategy consisting of Error Backtrack and Diagnosis and Adaptive Action SubTree Generation, which locally reconstructs the affected portion of the plan based on the current environment state. Experiments demonstrate that SDA-PLANNER consistently outperforms baselines in success rate and goal completion, particularly under diverse error conditions.

Zichao Shen, Tianchen Zhu, Qingyun Sun et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) faces challenges in evaluating policy trajectories within intricate game tasks due to the difficulty in designing comprehensive and precise reward functions. This inherent difficulty curtails the broader application of RL within game environments characterized by diverse constraints. Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) presents a pioneering framework that capitalizes on human preferences as pivotal reward signals, thereby circumventing the need for meticulous reward engineering. However, obtaining preference data from human experts is costly and inefficient, especially under conditions marked by complex constraints. To tackle this challenge, we propose a LLM-enabled automatic preference generation framework named LLM4PG , which harnesses the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to abstract trajectories, rank preferences, and reconstruct reward functions to optimize conditioned policies. Experiments on tasks with complex language constraints demonstrated the effectiveness of our LLM-enabled reward functions, accelerating RL convergence and overcoming stagnation caused by slow or absent progress under original reward structures. This approach mitigates the reliance on specialized human knowledge and demonstrates the potential of LLMs to enhance RL's effectiveness in complex environments in the wild.