It has been demonstrated that leading cruise control (LCC) can improve the operation of mixed-autonomy platoons by allowing connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) to make longitudinal control decisions based on the information provided by surrounding vehicles. However, LCC generally requires surrounding human-driven vehicles (HDVs) to share their real-time states, which can be used by adversaries to infer drivers' car-following behavior, potentially leading to financial losses or safety concerns. This paper aims to address such privacy concerns and protect the behavioral characteristics of HDVs by devising a parameter privacy-preserving approach for mixed-autonomy platoon control. First, we integrate a parameter privacy filter into LCC to protect sensitive car-following parameters. The privacy filter allows each vehicle to generate seemingly realistic pseudo states by distorting the true parameters to pseudo parameters, which can protect drivers' privacy in behavioral parameters without significantly influencing the control performance. Second, to enhance the practicality and reliability of the privacy filter within LCC, we first extend the current approach to accommodate continuous parameter spaces through a neural network estimator. Subsequently, we introduce an individual-level parameter privacy preservation constraint, focusing on the privacy level of each individual parameter pair, further enhancing the approach's reliability. Third, analysis of head-to-tail string stability reveals the potential impact of privacy filters in degrading mixed traffic flow performance. Simulation shows that this approach can effectively trade off privacy and control performance in LCC. We further demonstrate the benefit of such an approach in networked systems, i.e., by applying the privacy filter to a proceeding vehicle, one can also achieve a certain level of privacy for the following vehicle.
Large language model (LLM) has achieved promising performance in multilingual machine translation tasks through zero/few-shot prompts or prompt-tuning. However, due to the mixture of multilingual data during the pre-training of LLM, the LLM-based translation models face the off-target issue in both prompt-based methods, including a series of phenomena, namely instruction misunderstanding, translation with wrong language and over-generation. For this issue, this paper introduces an \textbf{\underline{A}}uto-\textbf{\underline{C}}onstriction \textbf{\underline{T}}urning mechanism for \textbf{\underline{M}}ultilingual \textbf{\underline{N}}eural \textbf{\underline{M}}achine \textbf{\underline{T}}ranslation (\model), which is a novel supervised fine-tuning mechanism and orthogonal to the traditional prompt-based methods. In this method, \model automatically constructs a constrained template in the target side by adding trigger tokens ahead of the ground truth. Furthermore, trigger tokens can be arranged and combined freely to represent different task semantics, and they can be iteratively updated to maximize the label likelihood. Experiments are performed on WMT test sets with multiple metrics, and the experimental results demonstrate that \model achieves substantially improved performance across multiple translation directions and reduce the off-target phenomena in the translation.
Lasso-type estimators are routinely used to estimate high-dimensional time series models. The theoretical guarantees established for Lasso typically require the penalty level to be chosen in a suitable fashion often depending on unknown population quantities. Furthermore, the resulting estimates and the number of variables retained in the model depend crucially on the chosen penalty level. However, there is currently no theoretically founded guidance for this choice in the context of high-dimensional time series. Instead one resorts to selecting the penalty level in an ad hoc manner using, e.g., information criteria or cross-validation. We resolve this problem by considering estimation of the perhaps most commonly employed multivariate time series model, the linear vector autoregressive (VAR) model, and propose a weighted Lasso estimator with penalization chosen in a fully data-driven way. The theoretical guarantees that we establish for the resulting estimation and prediction error match those currently available for methods based on infeasible choices of penalization. We thus provide a first solution for choosing the penalization in high-dimensional time series models.
Developing high-performance, real-time architectures for LiDAR-based 3D object detectors is essential for the successful commercialization of autonomous vehicles. Pillar-based methods stand out as a practical choice for onboard deployment due to their computational efficiency. However, despite their efficiency, these methods can sometimes underperform compared to alternative point encoding techniques such as Voxel-encoding or PointNet++. We argue that current pillar-based methods have not sufficiently captured the fine-grained distributions of LiDAR points within each pillar structure. Consequently, there exists considerable room for improvement in pillar feature encoding. In this paper, we introduce a novel pillar encoding architecture referred to as Fine-Grained Pillar Feature Encoding (FG-PFE). FG-PFE utilizes Spatio-Temporal Virtual (STV) grids to capture the distribution of point clouds within each pillar across vertical, temporal, and horizontal dimensions. Through STV grids, points within each pillar are individually encoded using Vertical PFE (V-PFE), Temporal PFE (T-PFE), and Horizontal PFE (H-PFE). These encoded features are then aggregated through an Attentive Pillar Aggregation method. Our experiments conducted on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that FG-PFE achieves significant performance improvements over baseline models such as PointPillar, CenterPoint-Pillar, and PillarNet, with only a minor increase in computational overhead.
We examine the linear regression problem in a challenging high-dimensional setting with correlated predictors where the vector of coefficients can vary from sparse to dense. In this setting, we propose a combination of probabilistic variable screening with random projection tools as a viable approach. More specifically, we introduce a new data-driven random projection tailored to the problem at hand and derive a theoretical bound on the gain in expected prediction error over conventional random projections. The variables to enter the projection are screened by accounting for predictor correlation. To reduce the dependence on fine-tuning choices, we aggregate over an ensemble of linear models. A thresholding parameter is introduced to obtain a higher degree of sparsity. Both this parameter and the number of models in the ensemble can be chosen by cross-validation. In extensive simulations, we compare the proposed method with other random projection tools and with classical sparse and dense methods and show that it is competitive in terms of prediction across a variety of scenarios with different sparsity and predictor covariance settings. We also show that the method with cross-validation is able to rank the variables satisfactorily. Finally, we showcase the method on two real data applications.
Recent years have witnessed significant advancement in face recognition (FR) techniques, with their applications widely spread in people's lives and security-sensitive areas. There is a growing need for reliable interpretations of decisions of such systems. Existing studies relying on various mechanisms have investigated the usage of saliency maps as an explanation approach, but suffer from different limitations. This paper first explores the spatial relationship between face image and its deep representation via gradient backpropagation. Then a new explanation approach FGGB has been conceived, which provides precise and insightful similarity and dissimilarity saliency maps to explain the "Accept" and "Reject" decision of an FR system. Extensive visual presentation and quantitative measurement have shown that FGGB achieves superior performance in both similarity and dissimilarity maps when compared to current state-of-the-art explainable face verification approaches.
Few-shot knowledge graph completion (FKGC) aims to query the unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. The side effect of noises due to the uncertainty of entities and triples may limit the few-shot learning, but existing FKGC works neglect such uncertainty, which leads them more susceptible to limited reference samples with noises. In this paper, we propose a novel uncertainty-aware few-shot KG completion framework (UFKGC) to model uncertainty for a better understanding of the limited data by learning representations under Gaussian distribution. Uncertainty representation is first designed for estimating the uncertainty scope of the entity pairs after transferring feature representations into a Gaussian distribution. Further, to better integrate the neighbors with uncertainty characteristics for entity features, we design an uncertainty-aware relational graph neural network (UR-GNN) to conduct convolution operations between the Gaussian distributions. Then, multiple random samplings are conducted for reference triples within the Gaussian distribution to generate smooth reference representations during the optimization. The final completion score for each query instance is measured by the designed uncertainty optimization to make our approach more robust to the noises in few-shot scenarios. Experimental results show that our approach achieves excellent performance on two benchmark datasets compared to its competitors.
Graph Neural Networks (GNN) has demonstrated the superior performance in many challenging applications, including the few-shot learning tasks. Despite its powerful capacity to learn and generalize from few samples, GNN usually suffers from severe over-fitting and over-smoothing as the model becomes deep, which limit the model scalability. In this work, we propose a novel Attentive GNN to tackle these challenges, by incorporating a triple-attention mechanism, \ie node self-attention, neighborhood attention, and layer memory attention. We explain why the proposed attentive modules can improve GNN for few-shot learning with theoretical analysis and illustrations. Extensive experiments show that the proposed Attentive GNN outperforms the state-of-the-art GNN-based methods for few-shot learning over the mini-ImageNet and Tiered-ImageNet datasets, with both inductive and transductive settings.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown dramatic improvements in single image super-resolution (SISR) by using large-scale external samples. Despite their remarkable performance based on the external dataset, they cannot exploit internal information within a specific image. Another problem is that they are applicable only to the specific condition of data that they are supervised. For instance, the low-resolution (LR) image should be a "bicubic" downsampled noise-free image from a high-resolution (HR) one. To address both issues, zero-shot super-resolution (ZSSR) has been proposed for flexible internal learning. However, they require thousands of gradient updates, i.e., long inference time. In this paper, we present Meta-Transfer Learning for Zero-Shot Super-Resolution (MZSR), which leverages ZSSR. Precisely, it is based on finding a generic initial parameter that is suitable for internal learning. Thus, we can exploit both external and internal information, where one single gradient update can yield quite considerable results. (See Figure 1). With our method, the network can quickly adapt to a given image condition. In this respect, our method can be applied to a large spectrum of image conditions within a fast adaptation process.
Image-to-image translation aims to learn the mapping between two visual domains. There are two main challenges for many applications: 1) the lack of aligned training pairs and 2) multiple possible outputs from a single input image. In this work, we present an approach based on disentangled representation for producing diverse outputs without paired training images. To achieve diversity, we propose to embed images onto two spaces: a domain-invariant content space capturing shared information across domains and a domain-specific attribute space. Our model takes the encoded content features extracted from a given input and the attribute vectors sampled from the attribute space to produce diverse outputs at test time. To handle unpaired training data, we introduce a novel cross-cycle consistency loss based on disentangled representations. Qualitative results show that our model can generate diverse and realistic images on a wide range of tasks without paired training data. For quantitative comparisons, we measure realism with user study and diversity with a perceptual distance metric. We apply the proposed model to domain adaptation and show competitive performance when compared to the state-of-the-art on the MNIST-M and the LineMod datasets.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.