Bundle adjustment (BA) is the standard way to optimise camera poses and to produce sparse representations of a scene. However, as the number of camera poses and features grows, refinement through bundle adjustment becomes inefficient. Inspired by global motion averaging methods, we propose a new bundle adjustment objective which does not rely on image features' reprojection errors yet maintains precision on par with classical BA. Our method averages over relative motions while implicitly incorporating the contribution of the structure in the adjustment. To that end, we weight the objective function by local hessian matrices - a by-product of local bundle adjustments performed on relative motions (e.g., pairs or triplets) during the pose initialisation step. Such hessians are extremely rich as they encapsulate both the features' random errors and the geometric configuration between the cameras. These pieces of information propagated to the global frame help to guide the final optimisation in a more rigorous way. We argue that this approach is an upgraded version of the motion averaging approach and demonstrate its effectiveness on both photogrammetric datasets and computer vision benchmarks.
We revisit parallel-innermost term rewriting as a model of parallel computation on inductive data structures and provide a corresponding notion of runtime complexity parametric in the size of the start term. We propose automatic techniques to derive both upper and lower bounds on parallel complexity of rewriting that enable a direct reuse of existing techniques for sequential complexity. Our approach to find lower bounds requires confluence of the parallel-innermost rewrite relation, thus we also provide effective sufficient criteria for proving confluence. The applicability and the precision of the method are demonstrated by the relatively light effort in extending the program analysis tool AProVE and by experiments on numerous benchmarks from the literature.
We present a scalable and effective exploration strategy based on Thompson sampling for reinforcement learning (RL). One of the key shortcomings of existing Thompson sampling algorithms is the need to perform a Gaussian approximation of the posterior distribution, which is not a good surrogate in most practical settings. We instead directly sample the Q function from its posterior distribution, by using Langevin Monte Carlo, an efficient type of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method. Our method only needs to perform noisy gradient descent updates to learn the exact posterior distribution of the Q function, which makes our approach easy to deploy in deep RL. We provide a rigorous theoretical analysis for the proposed method and demonstrate that, in the linear Markov decision process (linear MDP) setting, it has a regret bound of $\tilde{O}(d^{3/2}H^{5/2}\sqrt{T})$, where $d$ is the dimension of the feature mapping, $H$ is the planning horizon, and $T$ is the total number of steps. We apply this approach to deep RL, by using Adam optimizer to perform gradient updates. Our approach achieves better or similar results compared with state-of-the-art deep RL algorithms on several challenging exploration tasks from the Atari57 suite.
For autonomous vehicles, driving safely is highly dependent on the capability to correctly perceive the environment in 3D space, hence the task of 3D object detection represents a fundamental aspect of perception. While 3D sensors deliver accurate metric perception, monocular approaches enjoy cost and availability advantages that are valuable in a wide range of applications. Unfortunately, training monocular methods requires a vast amount of annotated data. Interestingly, self-supervised approaches have recently been successfully applied to ease the training process and unlock access to widely available unlabelled data. While related research leverages different priors including LIDAR scans and stereo images, such priors again limit usability. Therefore, in this work, we propose a novel approach to self-supervise 3D object detection purely from RGB sequences alone, leveraging multi-view constraints and weak labels. Our experiments on KITTI 3D dataset demonstrate performance on par with state-of-the-art self-supervised methods using LIDAR scans or stereo images.
Non-monotone object rearrangement planning in confined spaces such as cabinets and shelves is a widely occurring but challenging problem in robotics. Both the robot motion and the available regions for object relocation are highly constrained because of the limited space. This work proposes a Multi-Stage Monte Carlo Tree Search (MS-MCTS) method to solve non-monotone object rearrangement planning problems in confined spaces. Our approach decouples the complex problem into simpler subproblems using an object stage topology. A subgoal-focused tree expansion algorithm that jointly considers the high-level planning and the low-level robot motion is designed to reduce the search space and better guide the search process. By fitting the task into the MCTS paradigm, our method produces optimistic solutions by balancing exploration and exploitation. The experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing methods regarding the planning time, the number of steps, and the total move distance. Moreover, we deploy our MS-MCTS to a real-world robot system and verify its performance in different confined environments.
Radars and cameras belong to the most frequently used sensors for advanced driver assistance systems and automated driving research. However, there has been surprisingly little research on radar-camera fusion with neural networks. One of the reasons is a lack of large-scale automotive datasets with radar and unmasked camera data, with the exception of the nuScenes dataset. Another reason is the difficulty of effectively fusing the sparse radar point cloud on the bird's eye view (BEV) plane with the dense images on the perspective plane. The recent trend of camera-based 3D object detection using BEV features has enabled a new type of fusion, which is better suited for radars. In this work, we present RC-BEVFusion, a modular radar-camera fusion network on the BEV plane. We propose BEVFeatureNet, a novel radar encoder branch, and show that it can be incorporated into several state-of-the-art camera-based architectures. We show significant performance gains of up to 28% increase in the nuScenes detection score, which is an important step in radar-camera fusion research. Without tuning our model for the nuScenes benchmark, we achieve the best result among all published methods in the radar-camera fusion category.
Architectures that first convert point clouds to a grid representation and then apply convolutional neural networks achieve good performance for radar-based object detection. However, the transfer from irregular point cloud data to a dense grid structure is often associated with a loss of information, due to the discretization and aggregation of points. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture, multi-scale KPPillarsBEV, that aims to mitigate the negative effects of grid rendering. Specifically, we propose a novel grid rendering method, KPBEV, which leverages the descriptive power of kernel point convolutions to improve the encoding of local point cloud contexts during grid rendering. In addition, we propose a general multi-scale grid rendering formulation to incorporate multi-scale feature maps into convolutional backbones of detection networks with arbitrary grid rendering methods. We perform extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset and evaluate the methods in terms of detection performance and computational complexity. The proposed multi-scale KPPillarsBEV architecture outperforms the baseline by 5.37% and the previous state of the art by 2.88% in Car AP4.0 (average precision for a matching threshold of 4 meters) on the nuScenes validation set. Moreover, the proposed single-scale KPBEV grid rendering improves the Car AP4.0 by 2.90% over the baseline while maintaining the same inference speed.
Pre-trained language models have been successful in many knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. However, recent work has shown that models such as BERT are not ``structurally ready'' to aggregate textual information into a [CLS] vector for dense passage retrieval (DPR). This ``lack of readiness'' results from the gap between language model pre-training and DPR fine-tuning. Previous solutions call for computationally expensive techniques such as hard negative mining, cross-encoder distillation, and further pre-training to learn a robust DPR model. In this work, we instead propose to fully exploit knowledge in a pre-trained language model for DPR by aggregating the contextualized token embeddings into a dense vector, which we call agg*. By concatenating vectors from the [CLS] token and agg*, our Aggretriever model substantially improves the effectiveness of dense retrieval models on both in-domain and zero-shot evaluations without introducing substantial training overhead. Code is available at //github.com/castorini/dhr
We present a monocular Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) using high level object and plane landmarks, in addition to points. The resulting map is denser, more compact and meaningful compared to point only SLAM. We first propose a high order graphical model to jointly infer the 3D object and layout planes from single image considering occlusions and semantic constraints. The extracted cuboid object and layout planes are further optimized in a unified SLAM framework. Objects and planes can provide more semantic constraints such as Manhattan and object supporting relationships compared to points. Experiments on various public and collected datasets including ICL NUIM and TUM mono show that our algorithm can improve camera localization accuracy compared to state-of-the-art SLAM and also generate dense maps in many structured environments.
Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have revolutionized the field of graph representation learning through effectively learned node embeddings, and achieved state-of-the-art results in tasks such as node classification and link prediction. However, current GNN methods are inherently flat and do not learn hierarchical representations of graphs---a limitation that is especially problematic for the task of graph classification, where the goal is to predict the label associated with an entire graph. Here we propose DiffPool, a differentiable graph pooling module that can generate hierarchical representations of graphs and can be combined with various graph neural network architectures in an end-to-end fashion. DiffPool learns a differentiable soft cluster assignment for nodes at each layer of a deep GNN, mapping nodes to a set of clusters, which then form the coarsened input for the next GNN layer. Our experimental results show that combining existing GNN methods with DiffPool yields an average improvement of 5-10% accuracy on graph classification benchmarks, compared to all existing pooling approaches, achieving a new state-of-the-art on four out of five benchmark data sets.
Relying entirely on an attention mechanism, the Transformer introduced by Vaswani et al. (2017) achieves state-of-the-art results for machine translation. In contrast to recurrent and convolutional neural networks, it does not explicitly model relative or absolute position information in its structure. Instead, it requires adding representations of absolute positions to its inputs. In this work we present an alternative approach, extending the self-attention mechanism to efficiently consider representations of the relative positions, or distances between sequence elements. On the WMT 2014 English-to-German and English-to-French translation tasks, this approach yields improvements of 1.3 BLEU and 0.3 BLEU over absolute position representations, respectively. Notably, we observe that combining relative and absolute position representations yields no further improvement in translation quality. We describe an efficient implementation of our method and cast it as an instance of relation-aware self-attention mechanisms that can generalize to arbitrary graph-labeled inputs.