Publications

A Blockchain Framework for Equitable and Secure Task Allocation in Robot Swarms

Alexandre Pacheco

Xue Liu

Marco Dorigo

Recent studies demonstrate the potential of blockchain to enable robots in a swarm to achieve secure consensus about the environment, partic… (see more)ularly when robots are homogeneous and perform identical tasks. Typically, robots receive rewards for their contributions to consensus achievement, but no studies have yet targeted heterogeneous swarms, in which the robots have distinct physical capabilities suited to different tasks. We present a novel framework that leverages domain knowledge to decompose the swarm mission into a hierarchy of tasks within smart contracts. This allows the robots to reach a consensus about both the environment and the action plan, allocating tasks among robots with diverse capabilities to improve their performance while maintaining security against faults and malicious behaviors. We refer to this concept as equitable and secure task allocation. Validated in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping missions, our approach not only achieves equitable task allocation among robots with varying capabilities, improving mapping accuracy and efficiency, but also shows resilience against malicious attacks.

2024-12-31

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (unknown)

doi.org

Body size and intracranial volume interact with the structure of the central nervous system: A multi-center in vivo neuroimaging study

René Labounek

Monica T. Bondy

Amy L. Paulson

Sandrine Bédard

Mihael Abramovic

Eva Alonso-Ortiz

Nicole T. Atcheson

Laura R. Barlow

Robert L. Barry

Markus Barth

Marco Battiston

Christian Büchel

Matthew D. Budde

Virginie Callot

Anna Combes

Benjamin De Leener

Maxime Descoteaux

Paulo Loureiro de Sousa

Marek Dostál

Julien Doyon … (see 74 more)

Adam V. Dvorak

Falk Eippert

Karla R. Epperson

Kevin S. Epperson

Patrick Freund

Jürgen Finsterbusch

Alexandru Foias

Michela Fratini

Issei Fukunaga

Claudia A.M. Gandini Wheeler-Kingshott

Giancarlo Germani

Guillaume Gilbert

Federico Giove

Francesco Grussu

Akifumi Hagiwara

Pierre-Gilles Henry

Tomáš Horák

Masaaki Hori

James M. Joers

Kouhei Kamiya

Haleh Karbasforoushan

Miloš Keřkovský

Ali Khatibi

Joo-Won Kim

Nawal Kinany

Hagen Kitzler

Shannon Kolind

Yazhuo Kong

Petr Kudlička

Paul Kuntke

Nyoman D. Kurniawan

Slawomir Kusmia

Maria Marcella Laganà

Cornelia Laule

Christine S.W. Law

Tobias Leutritz

Yaou Liu

Sara Llufriu

Sean Mackey

Allan R. Martin

Eloy Martinez-Heras

Loan Mattera

Kristin P. O'Grady

Nico Papinutto

Daniel Papp

Deborah Pareto

Todd B. Parrish

Anna Pichiecchio

Ferran Prados

Àlex Rovira

Marc J. Ruitenberg

Rebecca S. Samson

Giovanni Savini

Maryam Seif

Alan C. Seifert

Alex K. Smith

Seth A. Smith

Zachary A. Smith

Elisabeth Solana

Yuichi Suzuki

George W Tackley

Alexandra Tinnermann

Jan Valosek

Dimitri Van De Ville

Marios C. Yiannakas

Kenneth A. Weber II

Nikolaus Weiskopf

Richard G. Wise

Patrik O. Wyss

Junqian Xu

Julien Cohen-Adad

Christophe Lenglet

Igor Nestrasil

Clinical research emphasizes the implementation of rigorous and reproducible study designs that rely on between-group matching or controllin… (see more)g for sources of biological variation such as subject’s sex and age. However, corrections for body size (i.e., height and weight) are mostly lacking in clinical neuroimaging designs. This study investigates the importance of body size parameters in their relationship with spinal cord (SC) and brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) metrics. Data were derived from a cosmopolitan population of 267 healthy human adults (age 30.1 ± 6.6 years old, 125 females). We show that body height correlates with brain gray matter (GM) volume, cortical GM volume, total cerebellar volume, brainstem volume, and cross-sectional area (CSA) of cervical SC white matter (CSA-WM; 0.44 ≤ r ≤ 0.62). Intracranial volume (ICV) correlates with body height (r = 0.46) and the brain volumes and CSA-WM (0.37 ≤ r ≤ 0.77). In comparison, age correlates with cortical GM volume, precentral GM volume, and cortical thickness (-0.21 ≥ r ≥ -0.27). Body weight correlates with magnetization transfer ratio in the SC WM, dorsal columns, and lateral corticospinal tracts (-0.20 ≥ r ≥ -0.23). Body weight further correlates with the mean diffusivity derived from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) in SC WM (r = -0.20) and dorsal columns (-0.21), but only in males. CSA-WM correlates with brain volumes (0.39 ≤ r ≤ 0.64), and with precentral gyrus thickness and DTI-based fractional anisotropy in SC dorsal columns and SC lateral corticospinal tracts (-0.22 ≥ r ≥ -0.25). Linear mixture of age, sex, or sex and age, explained 2 ± 2%, 24 ± 10%, or 26 ± 10%, of data variance in brain volumetry and SC CSA. The amount of explained variance increased to 33 ± 11%, 41 ± 17%, or 46 ± 17%, when body height, ICV, or body height and ICV were added into the mixture model. In females, the explained variances halved suggesting another unidentified biological factor(s) determining females’ central nervous system (CNS) morphology. In conclusion, body size and ICV are significant biological variables. Along with sex and age, body size should therefore be included as a mandatory variable in the design of clinical neuroimaging studies examining SC and brain structure; and body size and ICV should be considered as covariates in statistical analyses. Normalization of different brain regions with ICV diminishes their correlations with body size, but simultaneously amplifies ICV-related variance (r = 0.72 ± 0.07) and suppresses volume variance of the different brain regions (r = 0.12 ± 0.19) in the normalized measurements.

2024-12-31

Imaging Neuroscience (published)

doi.org

Can We Learn Communication-Efficient Optimizers?

Charles-Etienne Joseph

2024-12-31

Trans. Mach. Learn. Res. (published)

doi.org

openreview.net

Causal Machine Learning: A Survey and Open Problems

Jean Kaddour

Aengus Lynch

Qi Liu

Matt J. Kusner

Ricardo Silva

Causal Machine Learning (CausalML) is an umbrella term for machine learning methods that formalize the data-generation process as a structur… (see more)al causal model (SCM). This perspective enables us to reason about the effects of changes to this process (interventions) and what would have happened in hindsight (counterfactuals). We categorize work in CausalML into five groups according to the problems they address: (1) causal supervised learning, (2) causal generative modeling, (3) causal explanations, (4) causal fairness, and (5) causal reinforcement learning. We systematically compare the methods in each category and point out open problems. Further, we review data-modality-specific applications in computer vision, natural language processing, and graph representation learning. Finally, we provide an overview of causal benchmarks and a critical discussion of the state of this nascent field, including recommendations for future work.

2024-12-31

Foundations and Trends in Optimization (published)

doi.org

arxiv.org

CAVE: Detecting and Explaining Commonsense Anomalies in Visual Environments

Rishika Bhagwatkar

Syrielle Montariol

Angelika Romanou

Beatriz Borges

Irina Rish

Antoine Bosselut

2024-12-31

EMNLP (published)

doi.org

arxiv.org

Changer le regard des étudiants sur les métiers de la comptabilité : Les effets de la simulation de gestion

Guillaume Dumas

Yann QUÉMÉNER

La comptabilité véhicule souvent injustement, une image terne et ennuyeuse, auprès du grand public et des jeunes étudiants choisissant l… (see more)eur orientation. Dans cet article, nous questionnons l’effet de pratiques pédagogiques sur la perception par les étudiants, des soft skills attendues par les employeurs. Pour cela nous réalisons une quasi-expérimentation dans laquelle nous comparons les perceptions des étudiants selon que le cours ait été animé sous un format classique (application des connaissances par le biais d’exercices avec corrigé par l’enseignant) ou sous la forme d’une simulation de gestion (application des connaissances en vue de prendre des décisions et piloter une entreprise fictive). Les résultats de la recherche montrent qu’une simulation de gestion, plus que les travaux dirigés classiques, permettent aux primo-apprenants en comptabilité, d’avoir une meilleure perception des soft skills attendues par les praticiens et les recruteurs. Nos résultats rappellent l’importance de donner une représentation réaliste (éloignée des clichés) de la profession, afin de rendre les filières d’enseignement de la comptabilité plus attractives.

2024-12-31

Finance Contrôle Stratégie (published)

doi.org

Charting the Landscape of African NLP: Mapping Progress and Shaping the Road Ahead

Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi

Michael A. Hedderich

David Ifeoluwa Adelani

Dietrich Klakow

2024-12-31

EMNLP (published)

doi.org

arxiv.org

Child- and Proxy-reported Differences in Patient-reported Outcome and Experience Measures in Pediatric Surgery: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Zanib Nafees

Siena O'Neill

Alexandra Dimmer

Elena Guadagno

Julia Ferreira

Nancy Mayo

Dan Poenaru

2024-12-31

Journal of Pediatric Surgery (published)

doi.org

Combining Domain and Alignment Vectors Provides Better Knowledge-Safety Trade-offs in LLMs

Megh Thakkar

Quentin Fournier

Matthew D Riemer

Pin-Yu Chen

Amal Zouaq

Payel Das

A. Chandar

2024-12-31

Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) (published)

doi.org

Connectivity-Aware Task Offloading for Remote Northern Regions: a Hybrid LEO-MEO Architecture

Mohammed Almekhlafi

Antoine Lesage-Landry

Gunes Karabulut Kurt

Arctic regions, such as northern Canada, face significant challenges in achieving consistent connectivity and low-latency computing services… (see more) due to the sparse coverage of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. To enhance service reliability in remote areas, this paper proposes a hybrid satellite architecture for task offloading that combines Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) and LEO satellites. We develop an optimization framework to maximize task offloading admission rate while balancing the energy consumption and delay requirements. Accounting for satellite visibility and limited computing resources, our approach integrates dynamic path selection with frequency and computational resource allocation. Because the formulated problem is NP-hard, we reformulate it into a mixed-integer convex form using disjunctive constraints and convex relaxation techniques, enabling efficient use of off-the-shelf optimization solvers. Simulation results show that, compared to a standalone LEO network, the proposed hybrid LEO-MEO architecture improves the task admission rate by 15\% and reduces the average delay by 12\%. These findings highlight the architecture's potential to enhance connectivity and user experience in remote Arctic areas.

2024-12-31

2025 IEEE 36th International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC) (published)

doi.org

arxiv.org

Correction to: Assessing the adoption of security policies by developers in terraform across different cloud providers

Alexandre Verdet

Mohammad Hamdaqa

Leuson Da Silva

Foutse Khomh

2024-12-31

Empir. Softw. Eng. (published)

doi.org