Robots rely heavily on sensors, especially RGB and depth cameras, to perceive and interact with the world. RGB cameras record 2D images with rich semantic information while missing precise spatial information. On the other side, depth cameras offer critical 3D geometry data but capture limited semantics. Therefore, integrating both modalities is crucial for learning representations for robotic perception and control. However, current research predominantly focuses on only one of these modalities, neglecting the benefits of incorporating both. To this end, we present $\textbf{Semantic-Geometric Representation} (\textbf{SGR})$, a universal perception module for robotics that leverages the rich semantic information of large-scale pre-trained 2D models and inherits the merits of 3D spatial reasoning. Our experiments demonstrate that SGR empowers the agent to successfully complete a diverse range of simulated and real-world robotic manipulation tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art methods significantly in both single-task and multi-task settings. Furthermore, SGR possesses the capability to generalize to novel semantic attributes, setting it apart from the other methods. Project website: //semantic-geometric-representation.github.io.
Various autonomous applications rely on recognizing specific known landmarks in their environment. For example, Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) is an important technique that lays the foundation for many common tasks, such as navigation and long-term object tracking. This entails building a map on the go based on sensory inputs which are prone to accumulating errors. Recognizing landmarks in the environment plays a vital role in correcting these errors and further improving the accuracy of SLAM. The most popular choice of sensors for conducting SLAM today is optical sensors such as cameras or LiDAR sensors. These can use landmarks such as QR codes as a prerequisite. However, such sensors become unreliable in certain conditions, e.g., foggy, dusty, reflective, or glass-rich environments. Sonar has proven to be a viable alternative to manage such situations better. However, acoustic sensors also require a different type of landmark. In this paper, we put forward a method to detect the presence of bio-mimetic acoustic landmarks using support vector machines trained on the frequency bands of the reflecting acoustic echoes using an embedded real-time imaging sonar.
Surface reconstruction with preservation of geometric features is a challenging computer vision task. Despite significant progress in implicit shape reconstruction, state-of-the-art mesh extraction methods often produce aliased, perceptually distorted surfaces and lack scalability to high-resolution 3D shapes. We present a data-driven approach for automatic feature detection and remeshing that requires only a coarse, aliased mesh as input and scales to arbitrary resolution reconstructions. We define and learn a collection of surface-based fields to (1) capture sharp geometric features in the shape with an implicit vertexwise model and (2) approximate improvements in normals alignment obtained by applying edge-flips with an edgewise model. To support scaling to arbitrary complexity shapes, we learn our fields using local triangulated patches, fusing estimates on complete surface meshes. Our feature remeshing algorithm integrates the learned fields as sharp feature priors and optimizes vertex placement and mesh connectivity for maximum expected surface improvement. On a challenging collection of high-resolution shape reconstructions in the ABC dataset, our algorithm improves over state-of-the-art by 26% normals F-score and 42% perceptual $\text{RMSE}_{\text{v}}$.
We introduce SAMPro3D for zero-shot 3D indoor scene segmentation. Given the 3D point cloud and multiple posed 2D frames of 3D scenes, our approach segments 3D scenes by applying the pretrained Segment Anything Model (SAM) to 2D frames. Our key idea involves locating 3D points in scenes as natural 3D prompts to align their projected pixel prompts across frames, ensuring frame-consistency in both pixel prompts and their SAM-predicted masks. Moreover, we suggest filtering out low-quality 3D prompts based on feedback from all 2D frames, for enhancing segmentation quality. We also propose to consolidate different 3D prompts if they are segmenting the same object, bringing a more comprehensive segmentation. Notably, our method does not require any additional training on domain-specific data, enabling us to preserve the zero-shot power of SAM. Extensive qualitative and quantitative results show that our method consistently achieves higher quality and more diverse segmentation than previous zero-shot or fully supervised approaches, and in many cases even surpasses human-level annotations. The project page can be accessed at //mutianxu.github.io/sampro3d/.
Reliable forecasting of traffic flow requires efficient modeling of traffic data. Different correlations and influences arise in a dynamic traffic network, making modeling a complicated task. Existing literature has proposed many different methods to capture the complex underlying spatial-temporal relations of traffic networks. However, methods still struggle to capture different local and global dependencies of long-range nature. Also, as more and more sophisticated methods are being proposed, models are increasingly becoming memory-heavy and, thus, unsuitable for low-powered devices. In this paper, we focus on solving these problems by proposing a novel deep learning framework - STLGRU. Specifically, our proposed STLGRU can effectively capture both local and global spatial-temporal relations of a traffic network using memory-augmented attention and gating mechanism. Instead of employing separate temporal and spatial components, we show that our memory module and gated unit can learn the spatial-temporal dependencies successfully, allowing for reduced memory usage with fewer parameters. We extensively experiment on several real-world traffic prediction datasets to show that our model performs better than existing methods while the memory footprint remains lower. Code is available at \url{//github.com/Kishor-Bhaumik/STLGRU}.
Future wireless networks, in particular, 5G and beyond, are anticipated to deploy dense Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites to provide global coverage and broadband connectivity. However, the limited frequency band and the coexistence of multiple constellations bring new challenges for interference management. In this paper, we propose a robust multilayer interference management scheme for spectrum sharing in heterogeneous satellite networks with statistical channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter (CSIT) and receivers (CSIR). In the proposed scheme, Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA), as a general and powerful framework for interference management and multiple access strategies, is implemented distributedly at GEO and LEO satellites, coined Distributed-RSMA (D-RSMA). By doing so, D-RSMA aims to mitigate the interference and boost the user fairness of the overall multilayer satellite system. Specifically, we study the problem of jointly optimizing the GEO/LEO precoders and message splits to maximize the minimum rate among User Terminals (UTs) subject to a transmit power constraint at all satellites. A robust algorithm is proposed to solve the original non-convex optimization problem. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness towards network load and CSI uncertainty of our proposed D-RSMA scheme. Benefiting from the interference management capability, D-RSMA provides significant max-min fairness performance gains compared to several benchmark schemes.
Existing knowledge graph (KG) embedding models have primarily focused on static KGs. However, real-world KGs do not remain static, but rather evolve and grow in tandem with the development of KG applications. Consequently, new facts and previously unseen entities and relations continually emerge, necessitating an embedding model that can quickly learn and transfer new knowledge through growth. Motivated by this, we delve into an expanding field of KG embedding in this paper, i.e., lifelong KG embedding. We consider knowledge transfer and retention of the learning on growing snapshots of a KG without having to learn embeddings from scratch. The proposed model includes a masked KG autoencoder for embedding learning and update, with an embedding transfer strategy to inject the learned knowledge into the new entity and relation embeddings, and an embedding regularization method to avoid catastrophic forgetting. To investigate the impacts of different aspects of KG growth, we construct four datasets to evaluate the performance of lifelong KG embedding. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art inductive and lifelong embedding baselines.
Data in Knowledge Graphs often represents part of the current state of the real world. Thus, to stay up-to-date the graph data needs to be updated frequently. To utilize information from Knowledge Graphs, many state-of-the-art machine learning approaches use embedding techniques. These techniques typically compute an embedding, i.e., vector representations of the nodes as input for the main machine learning algorithm. If a graph update occurs later on -- specifically when nodes are added or removed -- the training has to be done all over again. This is undesirable, because of the time it takes and also because downstream models which were trained with these embeddings have to be retrained if they change significantly. In this paper, we investigate embedding updates that do not require full retraining and evaluate them in combination with various embedding models on real dynamic Knowledge Graphs covering multiple use cases. We study approaches that place newly appearing nodes optimally according to local information, but notice that this does not work well. However, we find that if we continue the training of the old embedding, interleaved with epochs during which we only optimize for the added and removed parts, we obtain good results in terms of typical metrics used in link prediction. This performance is obtained much faster than with a complete retraining and hence makes it possible to maintain embeddings for dynamic Knowledge Graphs.
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.
Knowledge graph (KG) embeddings learn low-dimensional representations of entities and relations to predict missing facts. KGs often exhibit hierarchical and logical patterns which must be preserved in the embedding space. For hierarchical data, hyperbolic embedding methods have shown promise for high-fidelity and parsimonious representations. However, existing hyperbolic embedding methods do not account for the rich logical patterns in KGs. In this work, we introduce a class of hyperbolic KG embedding models that simultaneously capture hierarchical and logical patterns. Our approach combines hyperbolic reflections and rotations with attention to model complex relational patterns. Experimental results on standard KG benchmarks show that our method improves over previous Euclidean- and hyperbolic-based efforts by up to 6.1% in mean reciprocal rank (MRR) in low dimensions. Furthermore, we observe that different geometric transformations capture different types of relations while attention-based transformations generalize to multiple relations. In high dimensions, our approach yields new state-of-the-art MRRs of 49.6% on WN18RR and 57.7% on YAGO3-10.
We investigate the problem of automatically determining what type of shoe left an impression found at a crime scene. This recognition problem is made difficult by the variability in types of crime scene evidence (ranging from traces of dust or oil on hard surfaces to impressions made in soil) and the lack of comprehensive databases of shoe outsole tread patterns. We find that mid-level features extracted by pre-trained convolutional neural nets are surprisingly effective descriptors for this specialized domains. However, the choice of similarity measure for matching exemplars to a query image is essential to good performance. For matching multi-channel deep features, we propose the use of multi-channel normalized cross-correlation and analyze its effectiveness. Our proposed metric significantly improves performance in matching crime scene shoeprints to laboratory test impressions. We also show its effectiveness in other cross-domain image retrieval problems: matching facade images to segmentation labels and aerial photos to map images. Finally, we introduce a discriminatively trained variant and fine-tune our system through our proposed metric, obtaining state-of-the-art performance.