In this report we explore the application of the Lagrange-Newton method to the SAM (smoothing-and-mapping) problem in mobile robotics. In Lagrange-Newton SAM, the angular component of each pose vector is expressed by orientation vectors and treated through Lagrange constraints. This is different from the typical Gauss-Newton approach where variations need to be mapped back and forth between Euclidean space and a manifold suitable for rotational components. We derive equations for five different types of measurements between robot poses: translation, distance, and rotation from odometry in the plane, as well as home-vector angle and compass angle from visual homing. We demonstrate the feasibility of the Lagrange-Newton approach for a simple example related to a cleaning robot scenario.
While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved success in computer vision tasks, it is vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Such attacks could mislead the victim model to make attacker-chosen prediction with a specific trigger pattern. Until now, the trigger injection of existing attacks is mainly limited to spatial domain. Recent works take advantage of perceptual properties of planting specific patterns in the frequency domain, which only reflect indistinguishable pixel-wise perturbations in pixel domain. However, in the black-box setup, the inaccessibility of training process often renders more complex trigger designs. Existing frequency attacks simply handcraft the magnitude of spectrum, introducing anomaly frequency disparities between clean and poisoned data and taking risks of being removed by image processing operations (such as lossy compression and filtering). In this paper, we propose a robust low-frequency black-box backdoor attack (LFBA), which minimally perturbs low-frequency components of frequency spectrum and maintains the perceptual similarity in spatial space simultaneously. The key insight of our attack restrict the search for the optimal trigger to low-frequency region that can achieve high attack effectiveness, robustness against image transformation defenses and stealthiness in dual space. We utilize simulated annealing (SA), a form of evolutionary algorithm, to optimize the properties of frequency trigger including the number of manipulated frequency bands and the perturbation of each frequency component, without relying on the knowledge from the victim classifier. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets verify the effectiveness and robustness of LFBA against image processing operations and the state-of-the-art backdoor defenses, as well as its inherent stealthiness in both spatial and frequency space, making it resilient against frequency inspection.
Time-series modeling in process industries faces the challenge of dealing with complex, multi-faceted, and evolving data characteristics. Conventional single model approaches often struggle to capture the interplay of diverse dynamics, resulting in suboptimal forecasts. Addressing this, we introduce the Recency-Weighted Temporally-Segmented (ReWTS, pronounced `roots') ensemble model, a novel chunk-based approach for multi-step forecasting. The key characteristics of the ReWTS model are twofold: 1) It facilitates specialization of models into different dynamics by segmenting the training data into `chunks' of data and training one model per chunk. 2) During inference, an optimization procedure assesses each model on the recent past and selects the active models, such that the appropriate mixture of previously learned dynamics can be recalled to forecast the future. This method not only captures the nuances of each period, but also adapts more effectively to changes over time compared to conventional `global' models trained on all data in one go. We present a comparative analysis, utilizing two years of data from a wastewater treatment plant and a drinking water treatment plant in Norway, demonstrating the ReWTS ensemble's superiority. It consistently outperforms the global model in terms of mean squared forecasting error across various model architectures by 10-70\% on both datasets, notably exhibiting greater resilience to outliers. This approach shows promise in developing automatic, adaptable forecasting models for decision-making and control systems in process industries and other complex systems.
In this paper, we initiate the study of rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) for a mono-static integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system, where the dual-functional base station (BS) simultaneously communicates with multiple users and detects multiple moving targets. We aim at optimizing the ISAC waveform to jointly maximize the max-min fairness (MMF) rate of the communication users and minimize the largest eigenvalue of the Cram\'er-Rao bound (CRB) matrix for unbiased estimation. The CRB matrix considered in this work is general as it involves the estimation of angular direction, complex reflection coefficient, and Doppler frequency for multiple moving targets. Simulation results demonstrate that RSMA maintains a larger communication and sensing trade-off than conventional space-division multiple access (SDMA) and it is capable of detecting multiple targets with a high detection accuracy. The finding highlights the potential of RSMA as an effective and powerful strategy for interference management in the general multi-user multi-target ISAC systems.
Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is considered as the potential key technology of the future mobile communication systems. The signal design is fundamental for the ISAC system. The reference signals in mobile communication systems have good detection performance, which is worth further research. Existing studies applied the single reference signal to radar sensing. In this paper, a multiple reference signals collaborative sensing scheme is designed. Specifically, we jointly apply channel state information reference signal (CSI-RS), positioning reference signal (PRS) and demodulation reference signal (DMRS) in radar sensing, which improve the performance of radar sensing via obtaining continuous time-frequency resource mapping. Cr\'amer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of the joint reference signal for distance and velocity estimation is derived. The impacts of carrier frequency and subcarrier spacing on the performance of distance and velocity estimation are revealed. The results of simulation experiments show that compared with the single reference signal sensing scheme, the multiple reference signals collaborative sensing scheme effectively improves the sensing accuracy. Moreover, because of the discontinuous OFDM symbols, the accuracy of velocity estimation could be further improved via compressed sensing (CS). This paper has verified that multiple reference signals, instead of single reference signal, have much more superior performance on radar sensing, which is a practical and efficient approach in designing ISAC signal.
We present a simultaneous sensor-based inspection and footprint coverage (SIFC) planning and control design with applications to autonomous robotic crack mapping and filling. The main challenge of the SIFC problem lies in the coupling of complete sensing (for mapping) and robotic footprint (for filling) coverage tasks. Initially, we assume known target information (e.g., crack) and employ classic cell decomposition methods to achieve complete sensing coverage of the workspace and complete robotic footprint coverage using the least-cost route. Subsequently, we generalize the algorithm to handle unknown target information, allowing the robot to scan and incrementally construct the target graph online while conducting robotic footprint coverage. The online polynomial-time SIFC planning algorithm minimizes the total robot traveling distance, guarantees complete sensing coverage of the entire workspace, and achieves near-optimal robotic footprint coverage, as demonstrated through empirical experiments. For the demonstrated application, we design coordinated nozzle motion control with the planned robot trajectory to efficiently fill all cracks within the robot's footprint. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the algorithm's design, performance, and comparisons. The SIFC algorithm offers a high-efficiency motion planning solution for various robotic applications requiring simultaneous sensing and actuation coverage.
Many recent advancements in recommender systems have focused on developing sequence-based and graph-based approaches. Both approaches proved useful in modeling intricate relationships within behavioral data, leading to promising outcomes in personalized ranking and next-item recommendation tasks while maintaining good scalability. However, they capture very different signals from data. While the former approach represents users directly through ordered interactions with recent items, the latter one aims to capture indirect dependencies across the interactions graph. This paper presents a novel multi-representational learning framework that exploits the synergies between these two paradigms. Our empirical evaluation on several datasets demonstrates that mutual training of sequential and graph components with the proposed framework significantly improves recommendations performance.
Vast amount of data generated from networks of sensors, wearables, and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices underscores the need for advanced modeling techniques that leverage the spatio-temporal structure of decentralized data due to the need for edge computation and licensing (data access) issues. While federated learning (FL) has emerged as a framework for model training without requiring direct data sharing and exchange, effectively modeling the complex spatio-temporal dependencies to improve forecasting capabilities still remains an open problem. On the other hand, state-of-the-art spatio-temporal forecasting models assume unfettered access to the data, neglecting constraints on data sharing. To bridge this gap, we propose a federated spatio-temporal model -- Cross-Node Federated Graph Neural Network (CNFGNN) -- which explicitly encodes the underlying graph structure using graph neural network (GNN)-based architecture under the constraint of cross-node federated learning, which requires that data in a network of nodes is generated locally on each node and remains decentralized. CNFGNN operates by disentangling the temporal dynamics modeling on devices and spatial dynamics on the server, utilizing alternating optimization to reduce the communication cost, facilitating computations on the edge devices. Experiments on the traffic flow forecasting task show that CNFGNN achieves the best forecasting performance in both transductive and inductive learning settings with no extra computation cost on edge devices, while incurring modest communication cost.
We present a large-scale study on unsupervised spatiotemporal representation learning from videos. With a unified perspective on four recent image-based frameworks, we study a simple objective that can easily generalize all these methods to space-time. Our objective encourages temporally-persistent features in the same video, and in spite of its simplicity, it works surprisingly well across: (i) different unsupervised frameworks, (ii) pre-training datasets, (iii) downstream datasets, and (iv) backbone architectures. We draw a series of intriguing observations from this study, e.g., we discover that encouraging long-spanned persistency can be effective even if the timespan is 60 seconds. In addition to state-of-the-art results in multiple benchmarks, we report a few promising cases in which unsupervised pre-training can outperform its supervised counterpart. Code is made available at //github.com/facebookresearch/SlowFast
Learning with limited data is a key challenge for visual recognition. Few-shot learning methods address this challenge by learning an instance embedding function from seen classes and apply the function to instances from unseen classes with limited labels. This style of transfer learning is task-agnostic: the embedding function is not learned optimally discriminative with respect to the unseen classes, where discerning among them is the target task. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to adapt the embedding model to the target classification task, yielding embeddings that are task-specific and are discriminative. To this end, we employ a type of self-attention mechanism called Transformer to transform the embeddings from task-agnostic to task-specific by focusing on relating instances from the test instances to the training instances in both seen and unseen classes. Our approach also extends to both transductive and generalized few-shot classification, two important settings that have essential use cases. We verify the effectiveness of our model on two standard benchmark few-shot classification datasets --- MiniImageNet and CUB, where our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art empirical performance.
In this paper, we propose the joint learning attention and recurrent neural network (RNN) models for multi-label classification. While approaches based on the use of either model exist (e.g., for the task of image captioning), training such existing network architectures typically require pre-defined label sequences. For multi-label classification, it would be desirable to have a robust inference process, so that the prediction error would not propagate and thus affect the performance. Our proposed model uniquely integrates attention and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models, which not only addresses the above problem but also allows one to identify visual objects of interests with varying sizes without the prior knowledge of particular label ordering. More importantly, label co-occurrence information can be jointly exploited by our LSTM model. Finally, by advancing the technique of beam search, prediction of multiple labels can be efficiently achieved by our proposed network model.