Collaboration is one of the most important factors in multi-robot systems. Considering certain real-world applications and to further promote its development, we propose a new benchmark to evaluate multi-robot collaboration in Target Trapping Environment (T2E). In T2E, two kinds of robots (called captor robot and target robot) share the same space. The captors aim to catch the target collaboratively, while the target will try to escape from the trap. Both the trapping and escaping process can use the environment layout to help achieve the corresponding objective, which requires high collaboration between robots and the utilization of the environment. For the benchmark, we present and evaluate multiple learning-based baselines in T2E, and provide insights into regimes of multi-robot collaboration. We also make our benchmark publicly available and encourage researchers from related robotics disciplines to propose, evaluate, and compare their solutions in this benchmark. Our project is released at //github.com/Dr-Xiaogaren/T2E.
Visual place recognition (VPR) is a highly challenging task that has a wide range of applications, including robot navigation and self-driving vehicles. VPR is particularly difficult due to the presence of duplicate regions and the lack of attention to small objects in complex scenes, resulting in recognition deviations. In this paper, we present ClusVPR, a novel approach that tackles the specific issues of redundant information in duplicate regions and representations of small objects. Different from existing methods that rely on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for feature map generation, ClusVPR introduces a unique paradigm called Clustering-based Weighted Transformer Network (CWTNet). CWTNet leverages the power of clustering-based weighted feature maps and integrates global dependencies to effectively address visual deviations encountered in large-scale VPR problems. We also introduce the optimized-VLAD (OptLAD) layer that significantly reduces the number of parameters and enhances model efficiency. This layer is specifically designed to aggregate the information obtained from scale-wise image patches. Additionally, our pyramid self-supervised strategy focuses on extracting representative and diverse information from scale-wise image patches instead of entire images, which is crucial for capturing representative and diverse information in VPR. Extensive experiments on four VPR datasets show our model's superior performance compared to existing models while being less complex.
Learning binary classifiers from positive and unlabeled data (PUL) is vital in many real-world applications, especially when verifying negative examples is difficult. Despite the impressive empirical performance of recent PUL methods, challenges like accumulated errors and increased estimation bias persist due to the absence of negative labels. In this paper, we unveil an intriguing yet long-overlooked observation in PUL: \textit{resampling the positive data in each training iteration to ensure a balanced distribution between positive and unlabeled examples results in strong early-stage performance. Furthermore, predictive trends for positive and negative classes display distinctly different patterns.} Specifically, the scores (output probability) of unlabeled negative examples consistently decrease, while those of unlabeled positive examples show largely chaotic trends. Instead of focusing on classification within individual time frames, we innovatively adopt a holistic approach, interpreting the scores of each example as a temporal point process (TPP). This reformulates the core problem of PUL as recognizing trends in these scores. We then propose a novel TPP-inspired measure for trend detection and prove its asymptotic unbiasedness in predicting changes. Notably, our method accomplishes PUL without requiring additional parameter tuning or prior assumptions, offering an alternative perspective for tackling this problem. Extensive experiments verify the superiority of our method, particularly in a highly imbalanced real-world setting, where it achieves improvements of up to $11.3\%$ in key metrics. The code is available at \href{//github.com/wxr99/HolisticPU}{//github.com/wxr99/HolisticPU}.
Vision-based perception modules are increasingly deployed in many applications, especially autonomous vehicles and intelligent robots. These modules are being used to acquire information about the surroundings and identify obstacles. Hence, accurate detection and classification are essential to reach appropriate decisions and take appropriate and safe actions at all times. Current studies have demonstrated that "printed adversarial attacks", known as physical adversarial attacks, can successfully mislead perception models such as object detectors and image classifiers. However, most of these physical attacks are based on noticeable and eye-catching patterns for generated perturbations making them identifiable/detectable by human eye or in test drives. In this paper, we propose a camera-based inconspicuous adversarial attack (\textbf{AdvRain}) capable of fooling camera-based perception systems over all objects of the same class. Unlike mask based fake-weather attacks that require access to the underlying computing hardware or image memory, our attack is based on emulating the effects of a natural weather condition (i.e., Raindrops) that can be printed on a translucent sticker, which is externally placed over the lens of a camera. To accomplish this, we provide an iterative process based on performing a random search aiming to identify critical positions to make sure that the performed transformation is adversarial for a target classifier. Our transformation is based on blurring predefined parts of the captured image corresponding to the areas covered by the raindrop. We achieve a drop in average model accuracy of more than $45\%$ and $40\%$ on VGG19 for ImageNet and Resnet34 for Caltech-101, respectively, using only $20$ raindrops.
Tracking subjects in videos is one of the most widely used functions in camera-based IoT applications such as security surveillance, smart city traffic safety enhancement, vehicle to pedestrian communication and so on. In the computer vision domain, tracking is usually achieved by first detecting subjects with bounding boxes, then associating detected bounding boxes across video frames. For many IoT systems, images captured by cameras are usually sent over the network to be processed at a different site that has more powerful computing resources than edge devices. However, sending entire frames through the network causes significant bandwidth consumption that may exceed the system bandwidth constraints. To tackle this problem, we propose ViFiT, a transformer-based model that reconstructs vision bounding box trajectories from phone data (IMU and Fine Time Measurements). It leverages a transformer ability of better modeling long-term time series data. ViFiT is evaluated on Vi-Fi Dataset, a large-scale multimodal dataset in 5 diverse real world scenes, including indoor and outdoor environments. To fill the gap of proper metrics of jointly capturing the system characteristics of both tracking quality and video bandwidth reduction, we propose a novel evaluation framework dubbed Minimum Required Frames (MRF) and Minimum Required Frames Ratio (MRFR). ViFiT achieves an MRFR of 0.65 that outperforms the state-of-the-art approach for cross-modal reconstruction in LSTM Encoder-Decoder architecture X-Translator of 0.98, resulting in a high frame reduction rate as 97.76%.
The problem of managing multi-service applications on top of Cloud-Edge networks in a QoS-aware manner has been thoroughly studied in recent years from a decision-making perspective. However, only a few studies addressed the problem of actively enforcing such decisions while orchestrating multi-service applications and considering infrastructure and application variations. In this article, we propose a next-gen orchestrator prototype based on Docker to achieve the continuous and QoS-compliant management of multiservice applications on top of geographically distributed Cloud-Edge resources, in continuity with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure monitoring tools. Finally, we assess our proposal over a geographically distributed testbed across Italy.
3D multi-object tracking (MOT) is essential for an autonomous mobile agent to safely navigate a scene. In order to maximize the perception capabilities of the autonomous agent, we aim to develop a 3D MOT framework that fuses camera and LiDAR sensor information. Building on our prior LiDAR-only work, ShaSTA, which models shape and spatio-temporal affinities for 3D MOT, we propose a novel camera-LiDAR fusion approach for learning affinities. At its core, this work proposes a fusion technique that generates a rich sensory signal incorporating information about depth and distant objects to enhance affinity estimation for improved data association, track lifecycle management, false-positive elimination, false-negative propagation, and track confidence score refinement. Our main contributions include a novel fusion approach for combining camera and LiDAR sensory signals to learn affinities, and a first-of-its-kind multimodal sequential track confidence refinement technique that fuses 2D and 3D detections. Additionally, we perform an ablative analysis on each fusion step to demonstrate the added benefits of incorporating the camera sensor, particular for small, distant objects that tend to suffer from the depth-sensing limits and sparsity of LiDAR sensors. In sum, our technique achieves state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes benchmark amongst multimodal 3D MOT algorithms using CenterPoint detections.
Localization is a crucial task for autonomous mobile robots in order to successfully move to goal locations in their environment. Usually, this is done in a robot-centric manner, where the robot maintains a map with its body in the center. In swarm robotics applications, where a group of robots needs to coordinate in order to achieve their common goals, robot-centric localization will not suffice as each member of the swarm has its own frame of reference. One way to deal with this problem is to create, maintain and share a common map (global coordinate system), among the members of the swarm. This paper presents an approach to global localization for a group of robots in unknown, GPS and landmark free environments that extends the localization scheme of the LadyBug algorithm. The main idea relies on members of the swarm staying still and acting as beacons, emitting electromagnetic signals. These stationary robots form a global frame of reference and the rest of the group localize themselves in it using the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI). The proposed method is evaluated, and the results obtained from the experiments are promising.
Autonomic computing investigates how systems can achieve (user) specified control outcomes on their own, without the intervention of a human operator. Autonomic computing fundamentals have been substantially influenced by those of control theory for closed and open-loop systems. In practice, complex systems may exhibit a number of concurrent and inter-dependent control loops. Despite research into autonomic models for managing computer resources, ranging from individual resources (e.g., web servers) to a resource ensemble (e.g., multiple resources within a data center), research into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to improve resource autonomy and performance at scale continues to be a fundamental challenge. The integration of AI/ML to achieve such autonomic and self-management of systems can be achieved at different levels of granularity, from full to human-in-the-loop automation. In this article, leading academics, researchers, practitioners, engineers, and scientists in the fields of cloud computing, AI/ML, and quantum computing join to discuss current research and potential future directions for these fields. Further, we discuss challenges and opportunities for leveraging AI and ML in next generation computing for emerging computing paradigms, including cloud, fog, edge, serverless and quantum computing environments.
Dialogue systems are a popular Natural Language Processing (NLP) task as it is promising in real-life applications. It is also a complicated task since many NLP tasks deserving study are involved. As a result, a multitude of novel works on this task are carried out, and most of them are deep learning-based due to the outstanding performance. In this survey, we mainly focus on the deep learning-based dialogue systems. We comprehensively review state-of-the-art research outcomes in dialogue systems and analyze them from two angles: model type and system type. Specifically, from the angle of model type, we discuss the principles, characteristics, and applications of different models that are widely used in dialogue systems. This will help researchers acquaint these models and see how they are applied in state-of-the-art frameworks, which is rather helpful when designing a new dialogue system. From the angle of system type, we discuss task-oriented and open-domain dialogue systems as two streams of research, providing insight into the hot topics related. Furthermore, we comprehensively review the evaluation methods and datasets for dialogue systems to pave the way for future research. Finally, some possible research trends are identified based on the recent research outcomes. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and up-to-date one at present in the area of dialogue systems and dialogue-related tasks, extensively covering the popular frameworks, topics, and datasets.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.