Accurately detecting objects in the environment is a key challenge for autonomous vehicles. However, obtaining annotated data for detection is expensive and time-consuming. We introduce PatchContrast, a novel self-supervised point cloud pre-training framework for 3D object detection. We propose to utilize two levels of abstraction to learn discriminative representation from unlabeled data: proposal-level and patch-level. The proposal-level aims at localizing objects in relation to their surroundings, whereas the patch-level adds information about the internal connections between the object's components, hence distinguishing between different objects based on their individual components. We demonstrate how these levels can be integrated into self-supervised pre-training for various backbones to enhance the downstream 3D detection task. We show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on three commonly-used 3D detection datasets.
Collaborative perception, which greatly enhances the sensing capability of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) by incorporating data from external resources, also brings forth potential security risks. CAVs' driving decisions rely on remote untrusted data, making them susceptible to attacks carried out by malicious participants in the collaborative perception system. However, security analysis and countermeasures for such threats are absent. To understand the impact of the vulnerability, we break the ground by proposing various real-time data fabrication attacks in which the attacker delivers crafted malicious data to victims in order to perturb their perception results, leading to hard brakes or increased collision risks. Our attacks demonstrate a high success rate of over 86% on high-fidelity simulated scenarios and are realizable in real-world experiments. To mitigate the vulnerability, we present a systematic anomaly detection approach that enables benign vehicles to jointly reveal malicious fabrication. It detects 91.5% of attacks with a false positive rate of 3% in simulated scenarios and significantly mitigates attack impacts in real-world scenarios.
The emergence of large-scale AI models, like GPT-4, has significantly impacted academia and industry, driving the demand for high-performance computing (HPC) to accelerate workloads. To address this, we present HPCClusterScape, a visualization system that enhances the efficiency and transparency of shared HPC clusters for large-scale AI models. HPCClusterScape provides a comprehensive overview of system-level (e.g., partitions, hosts, and workload status) and application-level (e.g., identification of experiments and researchers) information, allowing HPC operators and machine learning researchers to monitor resource utilization and identify issues through customizable violation rules. The system includes diagnostic tools to investigate workload imbalances and synchronization bottlenecks in large-scale distributed deep learning experiments. Deployed in industrial-scale HPC clusters, HPCClusterScape incorporates user feedback and meets specific requirements. This paper outlines the challenges and prerequisites for efficient HPC operation, introduces the interactive visualization system, and highlights its contributions in addressing pain points and optimizing resource utilization in shared HPC clusters.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in the autonomous driving sector, particularly in generalization and interpretability. We introduce a unique object-level multimodal LLM architecture that merges vectorized numeric modalities with a pre-trained LLM to improve context understanding in driving situations. We also present a new dataset of 160k QA pairs derived from 10k driving scenarios, paired with high quality control commands collected with RL agent and question answer pairs generated by teacher LLM (GPT-3.5). A distinct pretraining strategy is devised to align numeric vector modalities with static LLM representations using vector captioning language data. We also introduce an evaluation metric for Driving QA and demonstrate our LLM-driver's proficiency in interpreting driving scenarios, answering questions, and decision-making. Our findings highlight the potential of LLM-based driving action generation in comparison to traditional behavioral cloning. We make our benchmark, datasets, and model available for further exploration.
Multiple object tracking (MOT) is a fundamental component of perception systems for autonomous driving, and its robustness to unseen conditions is a requirement to avoid life-critical failures. Despite the urge of safety in driving systems, no solution to the MOT adaptation problem to domain shift in test-time conditions has ever been proposed. However, the nature of a MOT system is manifold - requiring object detection and instance association - and adapting all its components is non-trivial. In this paper, we analyze the effect of domain shift on appearance-based trackers, and introduce DARTH, a holistic test-time adaptation framework for MOT. We propose a detection consistency formulation to adapt object detection in a self-supervised fashion, while adapting the instance appearance representations via our novel patch contrastive loss. We evaluate our method on a variety of domain shifts - including sim-to-real, outdoor-to-indoor, indoor-to-outdoor - and substantially improve the source model performance on all metrics. Code: //github.com/mattiasegu/darth.
knowledge graph-based recommendation methods have achieved great success in the field of recommender systems. However, over-reliance on high-quality knowledge graphs is a bottleneck for such methods. Specifically, the long-tailed distribution of entities of KG and noise issues in the real world will make item-entity dependent relations deviate from reflecting true characteristics and significantly harm the performance of modeling user preference. Contrastive learning, as a novel method that is employed for data augmentation and denoising, provides inspiration to fill this research gap. However, the mainstream work only focuses on the long-tail properties of the number of items clicked, while ignoring that the long-tail properties of total number of clicks per user may also affect the performance of the recommendation model. Therefore, to tackle these problems, motivated by the Debiased Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Sentence Representations (DCLR), we propose Two-Level Debiased Contrastive Graph Learning (TDCGL) model. Specifically, we design the Two-Level Debiased Contrastive Learning (TDCL) and deploy it in the KG, which is conducted not only on User-Item pairs but also on User-User pairs for modeling higher-order relations. Also, to reduce the bias caused by random sampling in contrastive learning, with the exception of the negative samples obtained by random sampling, we add a noise-based generation of negation to ensure spatial uniformity. Considerable experiments on open-source datasets demonstrate that our method has excellent anti-noise capability and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. In addition, ablation studies about the necessity for each level of TDCL are conducted.
Discovering potential failures of an autonomous system is important prior to deployment. Falsification-based methods are often used to assess the safety of such systems, but the cost of running many accurate simulation can be high. The validation can be accelerated by identifying critical failure scenarios for the system under test and by reducing the simulation runtime. We propose a Bayesian approach that integrates meta-learning strategies with a multi-armed bandit framework. Our method involves learning distributions over scenario parameters that are prone to triggering failures in the system under test, as well as a distribution over fidelity settings that enable fast and accurate simulations. In the spirit of meta-learning, we also assess whether the learned fidelity settings distribution facilitates faster learning of the scenario parameter distributions for new scenarios. We showcase our methodology using a cutting-edge 3D driving simulator, incorporating 16 fidelity settings for an autonomous vehicle stack that includes camera and lidar sensors. We evaluate various scenarios based on an autonomous vehicle pre-crash typology. As a result, our approach achieves a significant speedup, up to 18 times faster compared to traditional methods that solely rely on a high-fidelity simulator.
Building archetypes, representative models of building stock, are crucial for precise energy simulations in Urban Building Energy Modeling. The current widely adopted building archetypes are developed on a nationwide scale, potentially neglecting the impact of local buildings' geometric specificities. We present Multi-scale Archetype Representation Learning (MARL), an approach that leverages representation learning to extract geometric features from a specific building stock. Built upon VQ-AE, MARL encodes building footprints and purifies geometric information into latent vectors constrained by multiple architectural downstream tasks. These tailored representations are proven valuable for further clustering and building energy modeling. The advantages of our algorithm are its adaptability with respect to the different building footprint sizes, the ability for automatic generation across multi-scale regions, and the preservation of geometric features across neighborhoods and local ecologies. In our study spanning five regions in LA County, we show MARL surpasses both conventional and VQ-AE extracted archetypes in performance. Results demonstrate that geometric feature embeddings significantly improve the accuracy and reliability of energy consumption estimates. Code, dataset and trained models are publicly available: //github.com/ZixunHuang1997/MARL-BuildingEnergyEstimation
Searching in a denied environment is challenging for swarm robots as no assistance from GNSS, mapping, data sharing, and central processing is allowed. However, using olfactory and auditory signals to cooperate like animals could be an important way to improve the collaboration of swarm robots. In this paper, an Olfactory-Auditory augmented Bug algorithm (OA-Bug) is proposed for a swarm of autonomous robots to explore a denied environment. A simulation environment is built to measure the performance of OA-Bug. The coverage of the search task can reach 96.93% using OA-Bug, which is significantly improved compared with a similar algorithm, SGBA. Furthermore, experiments are conducted on real swarm robots to prove the validity of OA-Bug. Results show that OA-Bug can improve the performance of swarm robots in a denied environment.
Object detectors usually achieve promising results with the supervision of complete instance annotations. However, their performance is far from satisfactory with sparse instance annotations. Most existing methods for sparsely annotated object detection either re-weight the loss of hard negative samples or convert the unlabeled instances into ignored regions to reduce the interference of false negatives. We argue that these strategies are insufficient since they can at most alleviate the negative effect caused by missing annotations. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective mechanism, called Co-mining, for sparsely annotated object detection. In our Co-mining, two branches of a Siamese network predict the pseudo-label sets for each other. To enhance multi-view learning and better mine unlabeled instances, the original image and corresponding augmented image are used as the inputs of two branches of the Siamese network, respectively. Co-mining can serve as a general training mechanism applied to most of modern object detectors. Experiments are performed on MS COCO dataset with three different sparsely annotated settings using two typical frameworks: anchor-based detector RetinaNet and anchor-free detector FCOS. Experimental results show that our Co-mining with RetinaNet achieves 1.4%~2.1% improvements compared with different baselines and surpasses existing methods under the same sparsely annotated setting.
Recently, the emergence of pre-trained models (PTMs) has brought natural language processing (NLP) to a new era. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of PTMs for NLP. We first briefly introduce language representation learning and its research progress. Then we systematically categorize existing PTMs based on a taxonomy with four perspectives. Next, we describe how to adapt the knowledge of PTMs to the downstream tasks. Finally, we outline some potential directions of PTMs for future research. This survey is purposed to be a hands-on guide for understanding, using, and developing PTMs for various NLP tasks.