Abstract

The evolving landscape of gig labor, particularly within food delivery platforms, has been influenced by a shift towards algorithmic management, emphasizing performance metrics as a daily burden to be carried through delivery work. Through a study of Indian food delivery agents, our paper suggests an emerging gamification culture between delivery platforms and workers. Agents gradually yet consistently adapt to stringent algorithmic management to overcome everyday work's precarity. Despite the challenges of performance pressure on food delivery labor, we capture the daily rhythms and routines of delivery work punctuated by flashes of agenting, revealing small capacities to make choices and influence work outcomes. By employing a qualitative research framework, we uncover the mechanisms through which delivery platforms manipulate labor, simultaneously exploring delivery agents' tactics to extract agency and exploit the platforms' rules. We develop the notion of 'agency’ to disentangle the idea of `gamification by agents’ as a socio-technical derivative governing food delivery agents in urban India. The findings highlight the potential of platform work empowering, albeit with limits, delivery agents with agency and decision-making authority.

Abstract

This work tackles the important task of understanding out-of-distribution behavior in two prominent types of generative models, i.e., GANs and Diffusion models. Understanding this behavior is crucial in understanding their broader utility and risks as these systems are increasingly deployed in our daily lives. Our first contribution is demonstrating that diffusion spaces outperform GANs' latent spaces in inverting high-quality OOD images. We also provide a theoretical analysis attributing this to the lack of prior holes in diffusion spaces. Our second significant contribution is to provide a theoretical hypothesis that diffusion spaces can be projected onto a bounded hypersphere, enabling image manipulation through geodesic traversal between inverted images. Our analysis shows that different geodesics share common attributes for the same manipulation, which we leverage to perform various image manipulations. We conduct thorough empirical evaluations to support and validate our claims. Finally, our third and final contribution introduces a novel approach to the few-shot sampling for out-of-distribution data by inverting a few images to sample from the cluster formed by the inverted latents. The proposed technique achieves state-of-the-art results for the few-shot generation task in terms of image quality. The effectiveness of the generated samples is further validated when used to augment data for underrepresented classes in a classification task, leading to improved performance. Our research underscores the promise of diffusion spaces in out-of-distribution imaging and offers avenues for further exploration.

Abstract

The Patent Office. Government of India Dance Teaching Tool Design No.: 413513-001 Date: 12/04/2024 Certified that the design of which a copy is annexed hereto has been registered as of the number and date given above in class 19-07 in respect of the application of such design to DANCE TEACHING TOOL in the name of 1. International Institute of Information Technology 2. Prof. Vinoo Alluri 3. S Jayachandran In pursuance of and subject to the provisions of the Designs Act, 2000 and the Designs Rule, 2001. Date of Issue: 10/07/2024

Abstract

Movement is the signature of life, whether it is external or internal. Movements are of the real existential world and the movements are of the experiential world. The movements of the existential world are natural while the movements of the world re-created, or the world of recreations are sports, games, dance, martial arts, dance, drama and theatre. All the mentioned vocabulary of movements comes to life only in the presence of an inferrer or an onlooker referred to as audience. Movement has been inferred by all the sentient beings and infers meaning out of the Movements1 . Movement is the primaeval way the sentient beings measure the reality which is experienced by them. Having said that, what are the ways the fundamentals of Movements can be understood? What are the agencies which produce the movement? What are the interdependency of the fundamental factors to create Movement, has been discussed and addressed.

Abstract

Movement is the mark of life, be it internal or external. The existential world that we live in and the experiential world that we perceive are marked with movements. The movements of the existential world constitute the natural movements while the movements of the experiential world constitute the re-created movements. The re-created movements are recreational in its essence and categorised as sports, games, dance, martial arts, dance, drama and theatre. All the mentioned recreational movements are inferred and cognised in the minds of the onlooker. The sentient beings infers meaning out of the movements and interprets the essence. Movement measures reality. Consequently, movement serves as the primal means through which sentient beings gauge the reality they experience. With this in mind, discussions have centred around understanding the fundamentals of movement, exploring the entities responsible for its production, and examining the intricate interplay of factors necessary for its creation.

Abstract

Accurately recognizing a revisited place is crucial for embodied agents to localize and navigate. This requires visual representations to be distinct, despite strong variations in camera viewpoint and scene appearance. Existing visual place recognition pipelines encode the whole image and search for matches. This poses a fundamental challenge in matching two images of the same place captured from different camera viewpoints: the similarity of what overlaps can be dominated by the dissimilarity of what does not overlap. We address this by encoding and searching for image segments instead of the whole images. We propose to use open-set image segmentation to decompose an image into `meaningful' entities (i.e., things and stuff). This enables us to create a novel image representation as a collection of multiple overlapping subgraphs connecting a segment with its neighboring segments, dubbed SuperSegment. Furthermore, to efficiently encode these SuperSegments into compact vector representations, we propose a novel factorized representation of feature aggregation. We show that retrieving these partial representations leads to significantly higher recognition recall than the typical whole image based retrieval. Our segments-based approach, dubbed SegVLAD, sets a new state-of-the-art in place recognition on a diverse selection of benchmark datasets, while being applicable to both generic and task-specialized image encoders. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of our method to revisit anything by evaluating our method on an object instance retrieval task, which bridges the two disparate areas of research: visual place recognition and object-goal navigation, through their common aim of recognizing goal objects specific to a place.

Abstract

Current algorithms for Maximal Frequent Subgraph (MFS) mining do not scale to large databases with more than 300k graphs. Frequency computation is commonly done using numerous subgraph isomorphism operations, which are computationally expensive. This paper explores a partition-based secondary memory algorithm, PMCS, that can make MFS mining for large databases viable. PMCS intelligently avoids redundant computations to perform frequency computation operations optimally. Its intermediate results are also small enough to fit in the main memory. Our results demonstrate that PMCS scales to databases of up to 1000k graphs with an average of 25-30 edges per graph.

Abstract

The Indian industrial sector has recorded a double-digit GDP growth of 10.3% in the first quarter of 2005-06. Substantial investments were made in the industrial sector, in general, and in heavy industries, in particular. Most of the industrial structures were constructed before 2000, and the buildings are in continuous production of goods. Due to the harsh chemical environment, the structural elements are getting distressed prior to the life span of the building. To avoid or reduce the shutdown period of the building, only damaged elements are preferred for strengthening. In the current study, a G+4 industrial building is considered. One side of the perimeter columns is damaged due to chemical spillage, which led to spalling and corrosion of columns. In the present study, the safety and efficacy of the building are reviewed using nonlinear static analysis in ETABS. The damaged columns are strengthened using concrete jacketing according to the Indian code. In case 1, only damaged columns at ground floor are strengthened as per the code provisions, and then the building is opened for use. In case 2, the building is strengthened at damaged columns for all floors and is analysed with nonlinear static analysis to compute the updated capacity of the column. Further, damage distribution is observed after the redistribution of moments due to stiffness modification in the building system. The decision to further strengthen is taken by observing the damage distribution and comparing updated capacity with the base shear of the region. The study demonstrated that the building with strengthening as per the base shear of the building with global retrofitting performed better than the building strengthened at ground floor columns.

Abstract

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Abstract

Efficiently generating grasp poses tailored to specific regions of an object is vital for various robotic manipulation tasks, especially in a dual-arm setup. This scenario presents a significant challenge due to the complex geometries involved, requiring a deep understanding of the local geometry to generate grasps efficiently on the specified constrained regions. Existing methods only explore settings involving table-top/small objects and require augmented datasets to train, limiting their performance on complex objects. We propose CGDF: Constrained Grasp Diffusion Fields, a diffusion-based grasp generative model that generalizes to objects with arbitrary geometries, as well as generates dense grasps on the target regions. CGDF uses a part-guided diffusion approach that enables it to get high sample efficiency in constrained grasping without explicitly training on massive constraint-augmented datasets. We provide qualitative and quantitative comparisons using analytical metrics and in simulation, in both unconstrained and constrained settings to show that our method can generalize to generate stable grasps on complex objects, especially useful for dual-arm manipulation settings, while existing methods struggle to do so. More results, code and an extended version of the paper can be found on the project page: https://constrained-grasp-diffusion.github.io/