The field of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is currently facing a reproducibility crisis. While solutions for standardized reporting have been proposed to address the issue, we still lack a benchmarking tool that enables standardization and reproducibility, while leveraging cutting-edge Reinforcement Learning (RL) implementations. In this paper, we introduce BenchMARL, the first MARL training library created to enable standardized benchmarking across different algorithms, models, and environments. BenchMARL uses TorchRL as its backend, granting it high performance and maintained state-of-the-art implementations while addressing the broad community of MARL PyTorch users. Its design enables systematic configuration and reporting, thus allowing users to create and run complex benchmarks from simple one-line inputs. BenchMARL is open-sourced on GitHub: //github.com/facebookresearch/BenchMARL
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Understanding and reasoning about spatial relationships is a fundamental capability for Visual Question Answering (VQA) and robotics. While Vision Language Models (VLM) have demonstrated remarkable performance in certain VQA benchmarks, they still lack capabilities in 3D spatial reasoning, such as recognizing quantitative relationships of physical objects like distances or size differences. We hypothesize that VLMs' limited spatial reasoning capability is due to the lack of 3D spatial knowledge in training data and aim to solve this problem by training VLMs with Internet-scale spatial reasoning data. To this end, we present a system to facilitate this approach. We first develop an automatic 3D spatial VQA data generation framework that scales up to 2 billion VQA examples on 10 million real-world images. We then investigate various factors in the training recipe, including data quality, training pipeline, and VLM architecture. Our work features the first internet-scale 3D spatial reasoning dataset in metric space. By training a VLM on such data, we significantly enhance its ability on both qualitative and quantitative spatial VQA. Finally, we demonstrate that this VLM unlocks novel downstream applications in chain-of-thought spatial reasoning and robotics due to its quantitative estimation capability. Project website: //spatial-vlm.github.io/
Conformal risk control (CRC) is a recently proposed technique that applies post-hoc to a conventional point predictor to provide calibration guarantees. Generalizing conformal prediction (CP), with CRC, calibration is ensured for a set predictor that is extracted from the point predictor to control a risk function such as the probability of miscoverage or the false negative rate. The original CRC requires the available data set to be split between training and validation data sets. This can be problematic when data availability is limited, resulting in inefficient set predictors. In this paper, a novel CRC method is introduced that is based on cross-validation, rather than on validation as the original CRC. The proposed cross-validation CRC (CV-CRC) extends a version of the jackknife-minmax from CP to CRC, allowing for the control of a broader range of risk functions. CV-CRC is proved to offer theoretical guarantees on the average risk of the set predictor. Furthermore, numerical experiments show that CV-CRC can reduce the average set size with respect to CRC when the available data are limited.
Despite recent progress in Multiple Object Tracking (MOT), several obstacles such as occlusions, similar objects, and complex scenes remain an open challenge. Meanwhile, a systematic study of the cost-performance tradeoff for the popular tracking-by-detection paradigm is still lacking. This paper introduces SMILEtrack, an innovative object tracker that effectively addresses these challenges by integrating an efficient object detector with a Siamese network-based Similarity Learning Module (SLM). The technical contributions of SMILETrack are twofold. First, we propose an SLM that calculates the appearance similarity between two objects, overcoming the limitations of feature descriptors in Separate Detection and Embedding (SDE) models. The SLM incorporates a Patch Self-Attention (PSA) block inspired by the vision Transformer, which generates reliable features for accurate similarity matching. Second, we develop a Similarity Matching Cascade (SMC) module with a novel GATE function for robust object matching across consecutive video frames, further enhancing MOT performance. Together, these innovations help SMILETrack achieve an improved trade-off between the cost ({\em e.g.}, running speed) and performance (e.g., tracking accuracy) over several existing state-of-the-art benchmarks, including the popular BYTETrack method. SMILETrack outperforms BYTETrack by 0.4-0.8 MOTA and 2.1-2.2 HOTA points on MOT17 and MOT20 datasets. Code is available at //github.com/pingyang1117/SMILEtrack_Official
The Internet of Things (IoT) will bring about the next industrial revolution in Industry 4.0. The communication aspect of IoT devices is one of the most critical factors in choosing the suitable device for the suitable usage. So far, the IoT physical layer communication challenges have been met with various communications protocols that provide varying strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, most of them are wireless protocols due to the sheer number of device requirements for IoT. This paper summarizes the network architectures of some of the most popular IoT wireless communications protocols. It also presents a comparative analysis of critical features, including power consumption, coverage, data rate, security, cost, and Quality of Service (QoS). This comparative study shows that Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) based IoT protocols (LoRa, Sigfox, NB-IoT, LTE-M ) are more suitable for future industrial applications because of their energy efficiency, high coverage, and cost efficiency. In addition, the study also presents an industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) application perspective on the suitability of LPWAN protocols in a particular scenario and addresses some open issues that need to be researched. Thus, this study can assist in deciding the most suitable protocol for an industrial and production field.
Representations learned via self-supervised learning (SSL) can be susceptible to dimensional collapse, where the learned representation subspace is of extremely low dimensionality and thus fails to represent the full data distribution and modalities. Dimensional collapse also known as the "underfilling" phenomenon is one of the major causes of degraded performance on downstream tasks. Previous work has investigated the dimensional collapse problem of SSL at a global level. In this paper, we demonstrate that representations can span over high dimensional space globally, but collapse locally. To address this, we propose a method called $\textit{local dimensionality regularization (LDReg)}$. Our formulation is based on the derivation of the Fisher-Rao metric to compare and optimize local distance distributions at an asymptotically small radius for each data point. By increasing the local intrinsic dimensionality, we demonstrate through a range of experiments that LDReg improves the representation quality of SSL. The results also show that LDReg can regularize dimensionality at both local and global levels.
Joint image-text embedding is the bedrock for most Vision-and-Language (V+L) tasks, where multimodality inputs are jointly processed for visual and textual understanding. In this paper, we introduce UNITER, a UNiversal Image-TExt Representation, learned through large-scale pre-training over four image-text datasets (COCO, Visual Genome, Conceptual Captions, and SBU Captions), which can power heterogeneous downstream V+L tasks with joint multimodal embeddings. We design three pre-training tasks: Masked Language Modeling (MLM), Image-Text Matching (ITM), and Masked Region Modeling (MRM, with three variants). Different from concurrent work on multimodal pre-training that apply joint random masking to both modalities, we use conditioned masking on pre-training tasks (i.e., masked language/region modeling is conditioned on full observation of image/text). Comprehensive analysis shows that conditioned masking yields better performance than unconditioned masking. We also conduct a thorough ablation study to find an optimal setting for the combination of pre-training tasks. Extensive experiments show that UNITER achieves new state of the art across six V+L tasks (over nine datasets), including Visual Question Answering, Image-Text Retrieval, Referring Expression Comprehension, Visual Commonsense Reasoning, Visual Entailment, and NLVR2.
The problem of Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) consists in following the trajectory of different objects in a sequence, usually a video. In recent years, with the rise of Deep Learning, the algorithms that provide a solution to this problem have benefited from the representational power of deep models. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on works that employ Deep Learning models to solve the task of MOT on single-camera videos. Four main steps in MOT algorithms are identified, and an in-depth review of how Deep Learning was employed in each one of these stages is presented. A complete experimental comparison of the presented works on the three MOTChallenge datasets is also provided, identifying a number of similarities among the top-performing methods and presenting some possible future research directions.
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have recently become one of the most powerful tools for graph analytics tasks in numerous applications, ranging from social networks and natural language processing to bioinformatics and chemoinformatics, thanks to their ability to capture the complex relationships between concepts. At present, the vast majority of GCNs use a neighborhood aggregation framework to learn a continuous and compact vector, then performing a pooling operation to generalize graph embedding for the classification task. These approaches have two disadvantages in the graph classification task: (1)when only the largest sub-graph structure ($k$-hop neighbor) is used for neighborhood aggregation, a large amount of early-stage information is lost during the graph convolution step; (2) simple average/sum pooling or max pooling utilized, which loses the characteristics of each node and the topology between nodes. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called, dual attention graph convolutional networks (DAGCN) to address these problems. DAGCN automatically learns the importance of neighbors at different hops using a novel attention graph convolution layer, and then employs a second attention component, a self-attention pooling layer, to generalize the graph representation from the various aspects of a matrix graph embedding. The dual attention network is trained in an end-to-end manner for the graph classification task. We compare our model with state-of-the-art graph kernels and other deep learning methods. The experimental results show that our framework not only outperforms other baselines but also achieves a better rate of convergence.
Named entity recognition (NER) in Chinese is essential but difficult because of the lack of natural delimiters. Therefore, Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) is usually considered as the first step for Chinese NER. However, models based on word-level embeddings and lexicon features often suffer from segmentation errors and out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. In this paper, we investigate a Convolutional Attention Network called CAN for Chinese NER, which consists of a character-based convolutional neural network (CNN) with local-attention layer and a gated recurrent unit (GRU) with global self-attention layer to capture the information from adjacent characters and sentence contexts. Also, compared to other models, not depending on any external resources like lexicons and employing small size of char embeddings make our model more practical. Extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods without word embedding and external lexicon resources on different domain datasets including Weibo, MSRA and Chinese Resume NER dataset.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have gained significant traction in the field of machine learning, particularly due to their high accuracy in visual recognition. Recent works have pushed the performance of GPU implementations of CNNs to significantly improve their classification and training times. With these improvements, many frameworks have become available for implementing CNNs on both CPUs and GPUs, with no support for FPGA implementations. In this work we present a modified version of the popular CNN framework Caffe, with FPGA support. This allows for classification using CNN models and specialized FPGA implementations with the flexibility of reprogramming the device when necessary, seamless memory transactions between host and device, simple-to-use test benches, and the ability to create pipelined layer implementations. To validate the framework, we use the Xilinx SDAccel environment to implement an FPGA-based Winograd convolution engine and show that the FPGA layer can be used alongside other layers running on a host processor to run several popular CNNs (AlexNet, GoogleNet, VGG A, Overfeat). The results show that our framework achieves 50 GFLOPS across 3x3 convolutions in the benchmarks. This is achieved within a practical framework, which will aid in future development of FPGA-based CNNs.
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