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  1. null (Ed.)
    Recent advances have spurred incredible progress in self-supervised pretraining for vision. We investigate what factors may play a role in the utility of these pretraining methods for practitioners. To do this, we evaluate various self-supervised algorithms across a comprehensive array of synthetic datasets and downstream tasks. We prepare a suite of synthetic data that enables an endless supply of annotated images as well as full control over dataset difficulty. Our experiments offer insights into how the utility of self-supervision changes as the number of available labels grows as well as how the utility changes as a function of the downstream task and the properties of the training data. We also find that linear evaluation does not correlate with finetuning performance. Code and data is available at \href{this https URL}{this http URL}. 
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  2. Construction robots have drawn increased attention as a potential means of improving construction safety and productivity. However, it is still challenging to ensure safe human-robot collaboration on dynamic and unstructured construction workspaces. On construction sites, multiple entities dynamically collaborate with each other and the situational context between them evolves continually. Construction robots must therefore be equipped to visually understand the scene’s contexts (i.e., semantic relations to surrounding entities), thereby safely collaborating with humans, as a human vision system does. Toward this end, this study builds a unique deep neural network architecture and develops a construction-specialized model by experimenting multiple fine-tuning scenarios. Also, this study evaluates its performance on real construction operations data in order to examine its potential toward real-world applications. The results showed the promising performance of the tuned model: the recall@5 on training and validation dataset reached 92% and 67%, respectively. The proposed method, which supports construction co-robots with the holistic scene understanding, is expected to contribute to promoting safer human-robot collaboration in construction. 
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