Point cloud registration is challenging in the presence of heavy outlier correspondences. This paper focuses on addressing the robust correspondence-based registration problem with gravity prior that often arises in practice. The gravity directions are typically obtained by inertial measurement units (IMUs) and can reduce the degree of freedom (DOF) of rotation from 3 to 1. We propose a novel transformation decoupling strategy by leveraging screw theory. This strategy decomposes the original 4-DOF problem into three sub-problems with 1-DOF, 2-DOF, and 1-DOF, respectively, thereby enhancing the computation efficiency. Specifically, the first 1-DOF represents the translation along the rotation axis and we propose an interval stabbing-based method to solve it. The second 2-DOF represents the pole which is an auxiliary variable in screw theory and we utilize a branch-and-bound method to solve it. The last 1-DOF represents the rotation angle and we propose a global voting method for its estimation. The proposed method sequentially solves three consensus maximization sub-problems, leading to efficient and deterministic registration. In particular, it can even handle the correspondence-free registration problem due to its significant robustness. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method is more efficient and robust than state-of-the-art methods, even when dealing with outlier rates exceeding 99%.
Many real-world auctions are dynamic processes, in which bidders interact and report information over multiple rounds with the auctioneer. The sequential decision making aspect paired with imperfect information renders analyzing the incentive properties of such auctions much more challenging than in the static case. It is clear that bidders often have incentives for manipulation, but the full scope of such strategies is not well-understood. We aim to develop a tool for better understanding the incentive properties in dynamic auctions by using reinforcement learning to learn the optimal strategic behavior for an auction participant. We frame the decision problem as a Markov Decision Process, show its relation to multi-task reinforcement learning and use a soft actor-critic algorithm with experience relabeling to best-respond against several known analytical equilibria as well as to find profitable deviations against exploitable bidder strategies.
Recently MLP-based methods have shown strong performance in point cloud analysis. Simple MLP architectures are able to learn geometric features in local point groups yet fail to model long-range dependencies directly. In this paper, we propose Point Deformable Network (PDNet), a concise MLP-based network that can capture long-range relations with strong representation ability. Specifically, we put forward Point Deformable Aggregation Module (PDAM) to improve representation capability in both long-range dependency and adaptive aggregation among points. For each query point, PDAM aggregates information from deformable reference points rather than points in limited local areas. The deformable reference points are generated data-dependent, and we initialize them according to the input point positions. Additional offsets and modulation scalars are learned on the whole point features, which shift the deformable reference points to the regions of interest. We also suggest estimating the normal vector for point clouds and applying Enhanced Normal Embedding (ENE) to the geometric extractors to improve the representation ability of single-point. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our PDNet.
This paper addresses the problem of multi-agent pursuit, where slow pursuers cooperate to capture fast evaders in a confined environment with obstacles. Existing heuristic algorithms often lack expressive coordination strategies and are highly sensitive to task conditions, requiring extensive hyperparameter tuning. In contrast, reinforcement learning (RL) has been applied to this problem and is capable of obtaining cooperative pursuit strategies. However, RL-based methods face challenges in training for complex scenarios due to the vast amount of training data and limited adaptability to varying task conditions, such as different scene sizes, varying numbers and speeds of obstacles, and flexible speed ratios of the evader to the pursuer. In this work, we combine RL and curriculum learning to introduce a flexible solver for multiagent pursuit problems, named TaskFlex Solver (TFS), which is capable of solving multi-agent pursuit problems with diverse and dynamically changing task conditions in both 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional scenarios. TFS utilizes a curriculum learning method that constructs task distributions based on training progress, enhancing training efficiency and final performance. Our algorithm consists of two main components: the Task Evaluator, which evaluates task success rates and selects tasks of moderate difficulty to maintain a curriculum archive, and the Task Sampler, which constructs training distributions by sampling tasks from the curriculum archive to maximize policy improvement. Experiments show that TFS produces much stronger performance than baselines and achieves close to 100% capture rates in both 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional multi-agent pursuit problems with diverse and dynamically changing scenes. The project website is at //sites.google.com/view/tfs-2023.
Outsourcing a relational database to the cloud offers several benefits, including scalability, availability, and cost-effectiveness. However, there are concerns about the security and confidentiality of the outsourced data. A general approach here would be to encrypt the data with a standardized encryption algorithm and then store the data only encrypted in the cloud. The problem with this approach, however, is that with encryption, important properties of the data such as sorting, format or comparability, which are essential for the functioning of database queries, are lost. One solution to this problem is the use of encryption algorithms, which also preserve these properties in the encrypted data, thus enabling queries to encrypted data. These algorithms range from simple algorithms like Caesar encryption to secure algorithms like mOPE. The report at hand presents a survey on common encryption techniques used for storing data in relation Cloud database services. It presents the applied methods and identifies their characteristics.
Stochastic programs where the uncertainty distribution must be inferred from noisy data samples are considered. The stochastic programs are approximated with distributionally-robust optimizations that minimize the worst-case expected cost over ambiguity sets, i.e., sets of distributions that are sufficiently compatible with the observed data. In this paper, the ambiguity sets capture the set of probability distributions whose convolution with the noise distribution remains within a ball centered at the empirical noisy distribution of data samples parameterized by the total variation distance. Using the prescribed ambiguity set, the solutions of the distributionally-robust optimizations converge to the solutions of the original stochastic programs when the numbers of the data samples grow to infinity. Therefore, the proposed distributionally-robust optimization problems are asymptotically consistent. This is proved under the assumption that the distribution of the noise is uniformly diagonally dominant. More importantly, the distributionally-robust optimization problems can be cast as tractable convex optimization problems and are therefore amenable to large-scale stochastic problems.
With the rapid development of the internet in the past decade, it has become increasingly important to extract valuable information from vast resources efficiently, which is crucial for establishing a comprehensive digital ecosystem, particularly in the context of research surveys and comprehension. The foundation of these tasks focuses on accurate extraction and deep mining of data from scientific documents, which are essential for building a robust data infrastructure. However, parsing raw data or extracting data from complex scientific documents have been ongoing challenges. Current data extraction methods for scientific documents typically use rule-based (RB) or machine learning (ML) approaches. However, using rule-based methods can incur high coding costs for articles with intricate typesetting. Conversely, relying solely on machine learning methods necessitates annotation work for complex content types within the scientific document, which can be costly. Additionally, few studies have thoroughly defined and explored the hierarchical layout within scientific documents. The lack of a comprehensive definition of the internal structure and elements of the documents indirectly impacts the accuracy of text classification and object recognition tasks. From the perspective of analyzing the standard layout and typesetting used in the specified publication, we propose a new document layout analysis framework called CTBR(Compartment & Text Blocks Refinement). Firstly, we define scientific documents into hierarchical divisions: base domain, compartment, and text blocks. Next, we conduct an in-depth exploration and classification of the meanings of text blocks. Finally, we utilize the results of text block classification to implement object recognition within scientific documents based on rule-based compartment segmentation.
Translational distance-based knowledge graph embedding has shown progressive improvements on the link prediction task, from TransE to the latest state-of-the-art RotatE. However, N-1, 1-N and N-N predictions still remain challenging. In this work, we propose a novel translational distance-based approach for knowledge graph link prediction. The proposed method includes two-folds, first we extend the RotatE from 2D complex domain to high dimension space with orthogonal transforms to model relations for better modeling capacity. Second, the graph context is explicitly modeled via two directed context representations. These context representations are used as part of the distance scoring function to measure the plausibility of the triples during training and inference. The proposed approach effectively improves prediction accuracy on the difficult N-1, 1-N and N-N cases for knowledge graph link prediction task. The experimental results show that it achieves better performance on two benchmark data sets compared to the baseline RotatE, especially on data set (FB15k-237) with many high in-degree connection nodes.
Answering questions that require reading texts in an image is challenging for current models. One key difficulty of this task is that rare, polysemous, and ambiguous words frequently appear in images, e.g., names of places, products, and sports teams. To overcome this difficulty, only resorting to pre-trained word embedding models is far from enough. A desired model should utilize the rich information in multiple modalities of the image to help understand the meaning of scene texts, e.g., the prominent text on a bottle is most likely to be the brand. Following this idea, we propose a novel VQA approach, Multi-Modal Graph Neural Network (MM-GNN). It first represents an image as a graph consisting of three sub-graphs, depicting visual, semantic, and numeric modalities respectively. Then, we introduce three aggregators which guide the message passing from one graph to another to utilize the contexts in various modalities, so as to refine the features of nodes. The updated nodes have better features for the downstream question answering module. Experimental evaluations show that our MM-GNN represents the scene texts better and obviously facilitates the performances on two VQA tasks that require reading scene texts.
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.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.