Synthesizing diverse dexterous grasps from uncertain partial observation is an important yet challenging task for physically intelligent embodiments. Previous works on generative grasp synthesis fell short of precisely capturing the complex grasp distribution and reasoning about shape uncertainty in the unstructured and often partially perceived reality. In this work, we introduce a novel model that can generate diverse grasps for a multi-fingered hand while introspectively handling perceptual uncertainty and recognizing unknown object geometry to avoid performance degradation. Specifically, we devise a Deep Latent Variable Model (DLVM) based on Normalizing Flows (NFs), facilitating hierarchical and expressive latent representation for modeling versatile grasps. Our model design counteracts typical pitfalls of its popular alternative in generative grasping, i.e., conditional Variational Autoencoders (cVAEs) whose performance is limited by mode collapse and miss-specified prior issues. Moreover, the resultant feature hierarchy and the exact flow likelihood computation endow our model with shape-aware introspective capabilities, enabling it to quantify the shape uncertainty of partial point clouds and detect objects of novel geometry. We further achieve performance gain by fusing this information with a discriminative grasp evaluator, facilitating a novel hybrid way for grasp evaluation. Comprehensive simulated and real-world experiments show that the proposed idea gains superior performance and higher run-time efficiency against strong baselines, including diffusion models. We also demonstrate substantial benefits of greater diversity for grasping objects in clutter and a confined workspace in the real world.
The incredible development of federated learning (FL) has benefited various tasks in the domains of computer vision and natural language processing, and the existing frameworks such as TFF and FATE has made the deployment easy in real-world applications. However, federated graph learning (FGL), even though graph data are prevalent, has not been well supported due to its unique characteristics and requirements. The lack of FGL-related framework increases the efforts for accomplishing reproducible research and deploying in real-world applications. Motivated by such strong demand, in this paper, we first discuss the challenges in creating an easy-to-use FGL package and accordingly present our implemented package FederatedScope-GNN (FS-G), which provides (1) a unified view for modularizing and expressing FGL algorithms; (2) comprehensive DataZoo and ModelZoo for out-of-the-box FGL capability; (3) an efficient model auto-tuning component; and (4) off-the-shelf privacy attack and defense abilities. We validate the effectiveness of FS-G by conducting extensive experiments, which simultaneously gains many valuable insights about FGL for the community. Moreover, we employ FS-G to serve the FGL application in real-world E-commerce scenarios, where the attained improvements indicate great potential business benefits. We publicly release FS-G, as submodules of FederatedScope, at //github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope to promote FGL's research and enable broad applications that would otherwise be infeasible due to the lack of a dedicated package.
Multi-modal fusion is a fundamental task for the perception of an autonomous driving system, which has recently intrigued many researchers. However, achieving a rather good performance is not an easy task due to the noisy raw data, underutilized information, and the misalignment of multi-modal sensors. In this paper, we provide a literature review of the existing multi-modal-based methods for perception tasks in autonomous driving. Generally, we make a detailed analysis including over 50 papers leveraging perception sensors including LiDAR and camera trying to solve object detection and semantic segmentation tasks. Different from traditional fusion methodology for categorizing fusion models, we propose an innovative way that divides them into two major classes, four minor classes by a more reasonable taxonomy in the view of the fusion stage. Moreover, we dive deep into the current fusion methods, focusing on the remaining problems and open-up discussions on the potential research opportunities. In conclusion, what we expect to do in this paper is to present a new taxonomy of multi-modal fusion methods for the autonomous driving perception tasks and provoke thoughts of the fusion-based techniques in the future.
Knowledge enhanced pre-trained language models (K-PLMs) are shown to be effective for many public tasks in the literature but few of them have been successfully applied in practice. To address this problem, we propose K-AID, a systematic approach that includes a low-cost knowledge acquisition process for acquiring domain knowledge, an effective knowledge infusion module for improving model performance, and a knowledge distillation component for reducing the model size and deploying K-PLMs on resource-restricted devices (e.g., CPU) for real-world application. Importantly, instead of capturing entity knowledge like the majority of existing K-PLMs, our approach captures relational knowledge, which contributes to better-improving sentence-level text classification and text matching tasks that play a key role in question answering (QA). We conducted a set of experiments on five text classification tasks and three text matching tasks from three domains, namely E-commerce, Government, and Film&TV, and performed online A/B tests in E-commerce. Experimental results show that our approach is able to achieve substantial improvement on sentence-level question answering tasks and bring beneficial business value in industrial settings.
Deep neural models in recent years have been successful in almost every field, including extremely complex problem statements. However, these models are huge in size, with millions (and even billions) of parameters, thus demanding more heavy computation power and failing to be deployed on edge devices. Besides, the performance boost is highly dependent on redundant labeled data. To achieve faster speeds and to handle the problems caused by the lack of data, knowledge distillation (KD) has been proposed to transfer information learned from one model to another. KD is often characterized by the so-called `Student-Teacher' (S-T) learning framework and has been broadly applied in model compression and knowledge transfer. This paper is about KD and S-T learning, which are being actively studied in recent years. First, we aim to provide explanations of what KD is and how/why it works. Then, we provide a comprehensive survey on the recent progress of KD methods together with S-T frameworks typically for vision tasks. In general, we consider some fundamental questions that have been driving this research area and thoroughly generalize the research progress and technical details. Additionally, we systematically analyze the research status of KD in vision applications. Finally, we discuss the potentials and open challenges of existing methods and prospect the future directions of KD and S-T learning.
Multiple instance learning (MIL) is a powerful tool to solve the weakly supervised classification in whole slide image (WSI) based pathology diagnosis. However, the current MIL methods are usually based on independent and identical distribution hypothesis, thus neglect the correlation among different instances. To address this problem, we proposed a new framework, called correlated MIL, and provided a proof for convergence. Based on this framework, we devised a Transformer based MIL (TransMIL), which explored both morphological and spatial information. The proposed TransMIL can effectively deal with unbalanced/balanced and binary/multiple classification with great visualization and interpretability. We conducted various experiments for three different computational pathology problems and achieved better performance and faster convergence compared with state-of-the-art methods. The test AUC for the binary tumor classification can be up to 93.09% over CAMELYON16 dataset. And the AUC over the cancer subtypes classification can be up to 96.03% and 98.82% over TCGA-NSCLC dataset and TCGA-RCC dataset, respectively.
With the advances of data-driven machine learning research, a wide variety of prediction problems have been tackled. It has become critical to explore how machine learning and specifically deep learning methods can be exploited to analyse healthcare data. A major limitation of existing methods has been the focus on grid-like data; however, the structure of physiological recordings are often irregular and unordered which makes it difficult to conceptualise them as a matrix. As such, graph neural networks have attracted significant attention by exploiting implicit information that resides in a biological system, with interactive nodes connected by edges whose weights can be either temporal associations or anatomical junctions. In this survey, we thoroughly review the different types of graph architectures and their applications in healthcare. We provide an overview of these methods in a systematic manner, organized by their domain of application including functional connectivity, anatomical structure and electrical-based analysis. We also outline the limitations of existing techniques and discuss potential directions for future research.
Link prediction on knowledge graphs (KGs) is a key research topic. Previous work mainly focused on binary relations, paying less attention to higher-arity relations although they are ubiquitous in real-world KGs. This paper considers link prediction upon n-ary relational facts and proposes a graph-based approach to this task. The key to our approach is to represent the n-ary structure of a fact as a small heterogeneous graph, and model this graph with edge-biased fully-connected attention. The fully-connected attention captures universal inter-vertex interactions, while with edge-aware attentive biases to particularly encode the graph structure and its heterogeneity. In this fashion, our approach fully models global and local dependencies in each n-ary fact, and hence can more effectively capture associations therein. Extensive evaluation verifies the effectiveness and superiority of our approach. It performs substantially and consistently better than current state-of-the-art across a variety of n-ary relational benchmarks. Our code is publicly available.
Most existing knowledge graphs suffer from incompleteness, which can be alleviated by inferring missing links based on known facts. One popular way to accomplish this is to generate low-dimensional embeddings of entities and relations, and use these to make inferences. ConvE, a recently proposed approach, applies convolutional filters on 2D reshapings of entity and relation embeddings in order to capture rich interactions between their components. However, the number of interactions that ConvE can capture is limited. In this paper, we analyze how increasing the number of these interactions affects link prediction performance, and utilize our observations to propose InteractE. InteractE is based on three key ideas -- feature permutation, a novel feature reshaping, and circular convolution. Through extensive experiments, we find that InteractE outperforms state-of-the-art convolutional link prediction baselines on FB15k-237. Further, InteractE achieves an MRR score that is 9%, 7.5%, and 23% better than ConvE on the FB15k-237, WN18RR and YAGO3-10 datasets respectively. The results validate our central hypothesis -- that increasing feature interaction is beneficial to link prediction performance. We make the source code of InteractE available to encourage reproducible research.
Deep reinforcement learning has recently shown many impressive successes. However, one major obstacle towards applying such methods to real-world problems is their lack of data-efficiency. To this end, we propose the Bottleneck Simulator: a model-based reinforcement learning method which combines a learned, factorized transition model of the environment with rollout simulations to learn an effective policy from few examples. The learned transition model employs an abstract, discrete (bottleneck) state, which increases sample efficiency by reducing the number of model parameters and by exploiting structural properties of the environment. We provide a mathematical analysis of the Bottleneck Simulator in terms of fixed points of the learned policy, which reveals how performance is affected by four distinct sources of error: an error related to the abstract space structure, an error related to the transition model estimation variance, an error related to the transition model estimation bias, and an error related to the transition model class bias. Finally, we evaluate the Bottleneck Simulator on two natural language processing tasks: a text adventure game and a real-world, complex dialogue response selection task. On both tasks, the Bottleneck Simulator yields excellent performance beating competing approaches.
We propose a novel attention gate (AG) model for medical imaging that automatically learns to focus on target structures of varying shapes and sizes. Models trained with AGs implicitly learn to suppress irrelevant regions in an input image while highlighting salient features useful for a specific task. This enables us to eliminate the necessity of using explicit external tissue/organ localisation modules of cascaded convolutional neural networks (CNNs). AGs can be easily integrated into standard CNN architectures such as the U-Net model with minimal computational overhead while increasing the model sensitivity and prediction accuracy. The proposed Attention U-Net architecture is evaluated on two large CT abdominal datasets for multi-class image segmentation. Experimental results show that AGs consistently improve the prediction performance of U-Net across different datasets and training sizes while preserving computational efficiency. The code for the proposed architecture is publicly available.