Constructing probability densities for inference in high-dimensional spectral data is often intractable. In this work, we use normalizing flows on structured spectral latent spaces to estimate such densities, enabling downstream inference tasks. In addition, we evaluate a method for uncertainty quantification when predicting unobserved state vectors associated with each spectrum. We demonstrate the capability of this approach on laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy data collected by the ChemCam instrument on the Mars rover Curiosity. Using our approach, we are able to generate realistic spectral samples and to accurately predict state vectors with associated well-calibrated uncertainties. We anticipate that this methodology will enable efficient probabilistic modeling of spectral data, leading to potential advances in several areas, including out-of-distribution detection and sensitivity analysis.
Differential equations in general and neural ODEs in particular are an essential technique in continuous-time system identification. While many deterministic learning algorithms have been designed based on numerical integration via the adjoint method, many downstream tasks such as active learning, exploration in reinforcement learning, robust control, or filtering require accurate estimates of predictive uncertainties. In this work, we propose a novel approach towards estimating epistemically uncertain neural ODEs, avoiding the numerical integration bottleneck. Instead of modeling uncertainty in the ODE parameters, we directly model uncertainties in the state space. Our algorithm - distributional gradient matching (DGM) - jointly trains a smoother and a dynamics model and matches their gradients via minimizing a Wasserstein loss. Our experiments show that, compared to traditional approximate inference methods based on numerical integration, our approach is faster to train, faster at predicting previously unseen trajectories, and in the context of neural ODEs, significantly more accurate.
We study the problem of estimating a rank-$1$ signal in the presence of rotationally invariant noise-a class of perturbations more general than Gaussian noise. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) provides a natural estimator, and sharp results on its performance have been obtained in the high-dimensional regime. Recently, an Approximate Message Passing (AMP) algorithm has been proposed as an alternative estimator with the potential to improve the accuracy of PCA. However, the existing analysis of AMP requires an initialization that is both correlated with the signal and independent of the noise, which is often unrealistic in practice. In this work, we combine the two methods, and propose to initialize AMP with PCA. Our main result is a rigorous asymptotic characterization of the performance of this estimator. Both the AMP algorithm and its analysis differ from those previously derived in the Gaussian setting: at every iteration, our AMP algorithm requires a specific term to account for PCA initialization, while in the Gaussian case, PCA initialization affects only the first iteration of AMP. The proof is based on a two-phase artificial AMP that first approximates the PCA estimator and then mimics the true AMP. Our numerical simulations show an excellent agreement between AMP results and theoretical predictions, and suggest an interesting open direction on achieving Bayes-optimal performance.
Potts models, which can be used to analyze dependent observations on a lattice, have seen widespread application in a variety of areas, including statistical mechanics, neuroscience, and quantum computing. To address the intractability of Potts likelihoods for large spatial fields, we propose fast ordered conditional approximations that enable rapid inference for observed and hidden Potts models. Our methods can be used to directly obtain samples from the approximate joint distribution of an entire Potts field. The computational complexity of our approximation methods is linear in the number of spatial locations; in addition, some of the necessary computations are naturally parallel. We illustrate the advantages of our approach using simulated data and a satellite image.
Autonomous mobile manipulation robots that can collect trolleys are widely used to liberate human resources and fight epidemics. Most prior robotic trolley collection solutions only detect trolleys with 2D poses or are merely based on specific marks and lack the formal design of planning algorithms. In this paper, we present a novel mobile manipulation system with applications in luggage trolley collection. The proposed system integrates a compact hardware design and a progressive perception and planning framework, enabling the system to efficiently and robustly collect trolleys in dynamic and complex environments. For the perception, we first develop a 3D trolley detection method that combines object detection and keypoint estimation. Then, a docking process in a short distance is achieved with an accurate point cloud plane detection method and a novel manipulator design. On the planning side, we formulate the robot's motion planning under a nonlinear model predictive control framework with control barrier functions to improve obstacle avoidance capabilities while maintaining the target in the sensors' field of view at close distances. We demonstrate our design and framework by deploying the system on actual trolley collection tasks, and their effectiveness and robustness are experimentally validated.
For the lack of adequate paired noisy-clean speech corpus in many real scenarios, non-parallel training is a promising task for DNN-based speech enhancement methods. However, because of the severe mismatch between input and target speech, many previous studies only focus on the magnitude spectrum estimation and remain the phase unaltered, resulting in the degraded speech quality under low signal-to-noise ratio conditions. To tackle this problem, we decouple the difficult target w.r.t. original spectrum optimization into spectral magnitude and phase, and a novel Cycle-in-Cycle generative adversarial network (dubbed CinCGAN) is proposed to jointly estimate the spectral magnitude and phase information stage by stage under unpaired data. In the first stage, we pretrain a magnitude CycleGAN to coarsely estimate the spectral magnitude of clean speech. In the second stage, we incorporate the pretrained CycleGAN in a complex-valued CycleGAN as a cycle-in-cycle structure to simultaneously recover phase information and refine the overall spectrum. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms previous baselines under non-parallel training. The evaluation on training the models with standard paired data also shows that CinCGAN achieves remarkable performance especially in reducing background noise and speech distortion.
Deep neural networks can be roughly divided into deterministic neural networks and stochastic neural networks.The former is usually trained to achieve a mapping from input space to output space via maximum likelihood estimation for the weights, which leads to deterministic predictions during testing. In this way, a specific weights set is estimated while ignoring any uncertainty that may occur in the proper weight space. The latter introduces randomness into the framework, either by assuming a prior distribution over model parameters (i.e. Bayesian Neural Networks) or including latent variables (i.e. generative models) to explore the contribution of latent variables for model predictions, leading to stochastic predictions during testing. Different from the former that achieves point estimation, the latter aims to estimate the prediction distribution, making it possible to estimate uncertainty, representing model ignorance about its predictions. We claim that conventional deterministic neural network based dense prediction tasks are prone to overfitting, leading to over-confident predictions, which is undesirable for decision making. In this paper, we investigate stochastic neural networks and uncertainty estimation techniques to achieve both accurate deterministic prediction and reliable uncertainty estimation. Specifically, we work on two types of uncertainty estimations solutions, namely ensemble based methods and generative model based methods, and explain their pros and cons while using them in fully/semi/weakly-supervised framework. Due to the close connection between uncertainty estimation and model calibration, we also introduce how uncertainty estimation can be used for deep model calibration to achieve well-calibrated models, namely dense model calibration. Code and data are available at //github.com/JingZhang617/UncertaintyEstimation.
Computing collision-free trajectories is of prime importance for safe navigation. We present an approach for computing the collision probability under Gaussian distributed motion and sensing uncertainty with the robot and static obstacle shapes approximated as ellipsoids. The collision condition is formulated as the distance between ellipsoids and unlike previous approaches we provide a method for computing the exact collision probability. Furthermore, we provide a tight upper bound that can be computed much faster during online planning. Comparison to other state-of-the-art methods is also provided. The proposed method is evaluated in simulation under varying configuration and number of obstacles.
Communication connectivity is desirable for safe and efficient operation of multi-robot systems. While decentralized algorithms for connectivity maintenance have been explored in recent literature, the majority of these works do not account for robot motion and sensing uncertainties. These uncertainties are inherent in practical robots and result in robots deviating from their desired positions which could potentially result in a loss of connectivity. In this paper we present a Decentralized Connectivity Maintenance algorithm accounting for robot motion and sensing Uncertainties (DCMU). We first propose a novel weighted graph definition for the multi-robot system that accounts for the aforementioned uncertainties along with realistic connectivity constraints such as line-of-sight connectivity and collision avoidance. Next we design a decentralized gradient-based controller for connectivity maintenance where we derive the gradients of our weighted graph edge weights required for computing the control. Finally, we perform multiple simulations to validate the connectivity maintenance performance of our DCMU algorithm under robot motion and sensing uncertainties and show an improvement compared to previous work.
Many representative graph neural networks, $e.g.$, GPR-GNN and ChebyNet, approximate graph convolutions with graph spectral filters. However, existing work either applies predefined filter weights or learns them without necessary constraints, which may lead to oversimplified or ill-posed filters. To overcome these issues, we propose $\textit{BernNet}$, a novel graph neural network with theoretical support that provides a simple but effective scheme for designing and learning arbitrary graph spectral filters. In particular, for any filter over the normalized Laplacian spectrum of a graph, our BernNet estimates it by an order-$K$ Bernstein polynomial approximation and designs its spectral property by setting the coefficients of the Bernstein basis. Moreover, we can learn the coefficients (and the corresponding filter weights) based on observed graphs and their associated signals and thus achieve the BernNet specialized for the data. Our experiments demonstrate that BernNet can learn arbitrary spectral filters, including complicated band-rejection and comb filters, and it achieves superior performance in real-world graph modeling tasks.
Most deep learning-based models for speech enhancement have mainly focused on estimating the magnitude of spectrogram while reusing the phase from noisy speech for reconstruction. This is due to the difficulty of estimating the phase of clean speech. To improve speech enhancement performance, we tackle the phase estimation problem in three ways. First, we propose Deep Complex U-Net, an advanced U-Net structured model incorporating well-defined complex-valued building blocks to deal with complex-valued spectrograms. Second, we propose a polar coordinate-wise complex-valued masking method to reflect the distribution of complex ideal ratio masks. Third, we define a novel loss function, weighted source-to-distortion ratio (wSDR) loss, which is designed to directly correlate with a quantitative evaluation measure. Our model was evaluated on a mixture of the Voice Bank corpus and DEMAND database, which has been widely used by many deep learning models for speech enhancement. Ablation experiments were conducted on the mixed dataset showing that all three proposed approaches are empirically valid. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in all metrics, outperforming previous approaches by a large margin.