Neural fields provide a continuous scene representation of 3D geometry and appearance in a way which has great promise for robotics applications. One functionality that unlocks unique use-cases for neural fields in robotics is object 6-DoF registration. In this paper, we provide an expanded analysis of the recent Reg-NF neural field registration method and its use-cases within a robotics context. We showcase the scenario of determining the 6-DoF pose of known objects within a scene using scene and object neural field models. We show how this may be used to better represent objects within imperfectly modelled scenes and generate new scenes by substituting object neural field models into the scene.
With the rapid development of deep learning, training Big Models (BMs) for multiple downstream tasks becomes a popular paradigm. Researchers have achieved various outcomes in the construction of BMs and the BM application in many fields. At present, there is a lack of research work that sorts out the overall progress of BMs and guides the follow-up research. In this paper, we cover not only the BM technologies themselves but also the prerequisites for BM training and applications with BMs, dividing the BM review into four parts: Resource, Models, Key Technologies and Application. We introduce 16 specific BM-related topics in those four parts, they are Data, Knowledge, Computing System, Parallel Training System, Language Model, Vision Model, Multi-modal Model, Theory&Interpretability, Commonsense Reasoning, Reliability&Security, Governance, Evaluation, Machine Translation, Text Generation, Dialogue and Protein Research. In each topic, we summarize clearly the current studies and propose some future research directions. At the end of this paper, we conclude the further development of BMs in a more general view.
In recent years, larger and deeper models are springing up and continuously pushing state-of-the-art (SOTA) results across various fields like natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV). However, despite promising results, it needs to be noted that the computations required by SOTA models have been increased at an exponential rate. Massive computations not only have a surprisingly large carbon footprint but also have negative effects on research inclusiveness and deployment on real-world applications. Green deep learning is an increasingly hot research field that appeals to researchers to pay attention to energy usage and carbon emission during model training and inference. The target is to yield novel results with lightweight and efficient technologies. Many technologies can be used to achieve this goal, like model compression and knowledge distillation. This paper focuses on presenting a systematic review of the development of Green deep learning technologies. We classify these approaches into four categories: (1) compact networks, (2) energy-efficient training strategies, (3) energy-efficient inference approaches, and (4) efficient data usage. For each category, we discuss the progress that has been achieved and the unresolved challenges.
Humans perceive the world by concurrently processing and fusing high-dimensional inputs from multiple modalities such as vision and audio. Machine perception models, in stark contrast, are typically modality-specific and optimised for unimodal benchmarks, and hence late-stage fusion of final representations or predictions from each modality (`late-fusion') is still a dominant paradigm for multimodal video classification. Instead, we introduce a novel transformer based architecture that uses `fusion bottlenecks' for modality fusion at multiple layers. Compared to traditional pairwise self-attention, our model forces information between different modalities to pass through a small number of bottleneck latents, requiring the model to collate and condense the most relevant information in each modality and only share what is necessary. We find that such a strategy improves fusion performance, at the same time reducing computational cost. We conduct thorough ablation studies, and achieve state-of-the-art results on multiple audio-visual classification benchmarks including Audioset, Epic-Kitchens and VGGSound. All code and models will be released.
Residual networks (ResNets) have displayed impressive results in pattern recognition and, recently, have garnered considerable theoretical interest due to a perceived link with neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs). This link relies on the convergence of network weights to a smooth function as the number of layers increases. We investigate the properties of weights trained by stochastic gradient descent and their scaling with network depth through detailed numerical experiments. We observe the existence of scaling regimes markedly different from those assumed in neural ODE literature. Depending on certain features of the network architecture, such as the smoothness of the activation function, one may obtain an alternative ODE limit, a stochastic differential equation or neither of these. These findings cast doubts on the validity of the neural ODE model as an adequate asymptotic description of deep ResNets and point to an alternative class of differential equations as a better description of the deep network limit.
Transformers have become one of the most important architectural innovations in deep learning and have enabled many breakthroughs over the past few years. Here we propose a simple attention-free network architecture, gMLP, based solely on MLPs with gating, and show that it can perform as well as Transformers in key language and vision applications. Our comparisons show that self-attention is not critical for Vision Transformers, as gMLP can achieve the same accuracy. For BERT, our model achieves parity with Transformers on pretraining perplexity and is better on some downstream tasks. On finetuning tasks where gMLP performs worse, making the gMLP model substantially larger can close the gap with Transformers. In general, our experiments show that gMLP can scale as well as Transformers over increased data and compute.
This paper proposes a generic method to learn interpretable convolutional filters in a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) for object classification, where each interpretable filter encodes features of a specific object part. Our method does not require additional annotations of object parts or textures for supervision. Instead, we use the same training data as traditional CNNs. Our method automatically assigns each interpretable filter in a high conv-layer with an object part of a certain category during the learning process. Such explicit knowledge representations in conv-layers of CNN help people clarify the logic encoded in the CNN, i.e., answering what patterns the CNN extracts from an input image and uses for prediction. We have tested our method using different benchmark CNNs with various structures to demonstrate the broad applicability of our method. Experiments have shown that our interpretable filters are much more semantically meaningful than traditional filters.
Graphical causal inference as pioneered by Judea Pearl arose from research on artificial intelligence (AI), and for a long time had little connection to the field of machine learning. This article discusses where links have been and should be established, introducing key concepts along the way. It argues that the hard open problems of machine learning and AI are intrinsically related to causality, and explains how the field is beginning to understand them.
Embedding entities and relations into a continuous multi-dimensional vector space have become the dominant method for knowledge graph embedding in representation learning. However, most existing models ignore to represent hierarchical knowledge, such as the similarities and dissimilarities of entities in one domain. We proposed to learn a Domain Representations over existing knowledge graph embedding models, such that entities that have similar attributes are organized into the same domain. Such hierarchical knowledge of domains can give further evidence in link prediction. Experimental results show that domain embeddings give a significant improvement over the most recent state-of-art baseline knowledge graph embedding models.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
We advocate the use of implicit fields for learning generative models of shapes and introduce an implicit field decoder for shape generation, aimed at improving the visual quality of the generated shapes. An implicit field assigns a value to each point in 3D space, so that a shape can be extracted as an iso-surface. Our implicit field decoder is trained to perform this assignment by means of a binary classifier. Specifically, it takes a point coordinate, along with a feature vector encoding a shape, and outputs a value which indicates whether the point is outside the shape or not. By replacing conventional decoders by our decoder for representation learning and generative modeling of shapes, we demonstrate superior results for tasks such as shape autoencoding, generation, interpolation, and single-view 3D reconstruction, particularly in terms of visual quality.