In typical in-hand manipulation tasks represented by object pivoting, the real-time perception of rotational slippage has been proven beneficial for improving the dexterity and stability of robotic hands. An effective strategy is to obtain the contact properties for measuring rotation angle through visuotactile sensing. However, existing methods for rotation estimation did not consider the impact of the incipient slip during the pivoting process, which introduces measurement errors and makes it hard to determine the boundary between stable contact and macro slip. This paper describes a generalized 2-d contact model under pivoting, and proposes a rotation measurement method based on the line-features in the stick region. The proposed method was applied to the Tac3D vision-based tactile sensors using continuous marker patterns. Experiments show that the rotation measurement system could achieve an average static measurement error of 0.17 degree and an average dynamic measurement error of 1.34 degree. Besides, the proposed method requires no training data and can achieve real-time sensing during the in-hand object pivoting.
Though supervised learning gains impressive success, the acquisition of indispensable large-scale labeled datasets are often impractical in biomedical imaging partially due to expensive costs and lengthy annotations done by experienced radiologists. Semi-supervised learning has been shown to be an effective way to address this limitation by leveraging useful information from unlabeled datasets. In this paper, we present a new semi-supervised learning method referred to as Dual-Decoder Consistency via Pseudo-Labels Guided Data Augmentation (DCPA) for medical image segmentation. We devise a consistency regularization to improve the semi-supervised learning. Specifically, to promote consistent representations during the training process, we use different decoders for student and teachers networks while maintain the same encoder. Moreover, to learn from unlabeled data, we create pseudo-labels generated by the teacher networks and augment the training data with the pseudo-labels. The two techniques contribute to the improved performance of the proposed method. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method on three representative medical image segmentation datasets. Extensive comparisons to the state-of-the-art medical image segmentation methods were carried out under typical scenarios with 10% and 20% labeled data. Experimental outcomes demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised medical image segmentation methods over the three semi-supervised settings. Furthermore, to explore the performance of proposed method under extreme condition, we conduct experiments with only 5% labeled data. The results further verify the superior performance of the proposed method. Source code is publicly online at //github.com/BinYCn/DCPA.git.
Multi-objective optimization is a type of decision making problems where multiple conflicting objectives are optimized. We study offline optimization of multi-objective policies from data collected by an existing policy. We propose a pessimistic estimator for the multi-objective policy values that can be easily plugged into existing formulas for hypervolume computation and optimized. The estimator is based on inverse propensity scores (IPS), and improves upon a naive IPS estimator in both theory and experiments. Our analysis is general, and applies beyond our IPS estimators and methods for optimizing them. The pessimistic estimator can be optimized by policy gradients and performs well in all of our experiments.
Although the number of gaze estimation datasets is growing, the application of appearance-based gaze estimation methods is mostly limited to estimating the point of gaze on a screen. This is in part because most datasets are generated in a similar fashion, where the gaze target is on a screen close to camera's origin. In other applications such as assistive robotics or marketing research, the 3D point of gaze might not be close to the camera's origin, meaning models trained on current datasets do not generalize well to these tasks. We therefore suggest generating a textured tridimensional mesh of the face and rendering the training images from a virtual camera at a specific position and orientation related to the application as a mean of augmenting the existing datasets. In our tests, this lead to an average 47% decrease in gaze estimation angular error.
Probabilistic inference in high-dimensional state-space models is computationally challenging. For many spatiotemporal systems, however, prior knowledge about the dependency structure of state variables is available. We leverage this structure to develop a computationally efficient approach to state estimation and learning in graph-structured state-space models with (partially) unknown dynamics and limited historical data. Building on recent methods that combine ideas from deep learning with principled inference in Gaussian Markov random fields (GMRF), we reformulate graph-structured state-space models as Deep GMRFs defined by simple spatial and temporal graph layers. This results in a flexible spatiotemporal prior that can be learned efficiently from a single time sequence via variational inference. Under linear Gaussian assumptions, we retain a closed-form posterior, which can be sampled efficiently using the conjugate gradient method, scaling favourably compared to classical Kalman filter based approaches
Treatment effect estimation in continuous time is crucial for personalized medicine. However, existing methods for this task are limited to point estimates of the potential outcomes, whereas uncertainty estimates have been ignored. Needless to say, uncertainty quantification is crucial for reliable decision-making in medical applications. To fill this gap, we propose a novel Bayesian neural controlled differential equation (BNCDE) for treatment effect estimation in continuous time. In our BNCDE, the time dimension is modeled through a coupled system of neural controlled differential equations and neural stochastic differential equations, where the neural stochastic differential equations allow for tractable variational Bayesian inference. Thereby, for an assigned sequence of treatments, our BNCDE provides meaningful posterior predictive distributions of the potential outcomes. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first tailored neural method to provide uncertainty estimates of treatment effects in continuous time. As such, our method is of direct practical value for promoting reliable decision-making in medicine.
We study the problem of few-shot graph classification across domains with nonequivalent feature spaces by introducing three new cross-domain benchmarks constructed from publicly available datasets. We also propose an attention-based graph encoder that uses three congruent views of graphs, one contextual and two topological views, to learn representations of task-specific information for fast adaptation, and task-agnostic information for knowledge transfer. We run exhaustive experiments to evaluate the performance of contrastive and meta-learning strategies. We show that when coupled with metric-based meta-learning frameworks, the proposed encoder achieves the best average meta-test classification accuracy across all benchmarks. The source code and data will be released here: //github.com/kavehhassani/metagrl
The key challenge of image manipulation detection is how to learn generalizable features that are sensitive to manipulations in novel data, whilst specific to prevent false alarms on authentic images. Current research emphasizes the sensitivity, with the specificity overlooked. In this paper we address both aspects by multi-view feature learning and multi-scale supervision. By exploiting noise distribution and boundary artifact surrounding tampered regions, the former aims to learn semantic-agnostic and thus more generalizable features. The latter allows us to learn from authentic images which are nontrivial to be taken into account by current semantic segmentation network based methods. Our thoughts are realized by a new network which we term MVSS-Net. Extensive experiments on five benchmark sets justify the viability of MVSS-Net for both pixel-level and image-level manipulation detection.
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
Knowledge graph embedding, which aims to represent entities and relations as low dimensional vectors (or matrices, tensors, etc.), has been shown to be a powerful technique for predicting missing links in knowledge graphs. Existing knowledge graph embedding models mainly focus on modeling relation patterns such as symmetry/antisymmetry, inversion, and composition. However, many existing approaches fail to model semantic hierarchies, which are common in real-world applications. To address this challenge, we propose a novel knowledge graph embedding model---namely, Hierarchy-Aware Knowledge Graph Embedding (HAKE)---which maps entities into the polar coordinate system. HAKE is inspired by the fact that concentric circles in the polar coordinate system can naturally reflect the hierarchy. Specifically, the radial coordinate aims to model entities at different levels of the hierarchy, and entities with smaller radii are expected to be at higher levels; the angular coordinate aims to distinguish entities at the same level of the hierarchy, and these entities are expected to have roughly the same radii but different angles. Experiments demonstrate that HAKE can effectively model the semantic hierarchies in knowledge graphs, and significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets for the link prediction task.
Learning latent representations of nodes in graphs is an important and ubiquitous task with widespread applications such as link prediction, node classification, and graph visualization. Previous methods on graph representation learning mainly focus on static graphs, however, many real-world graphs are dynamic and evolve over time. In this paper, we present Dynamic Self-Attention Network (DySAT), a novel neural architecture that operates on dynamic graphs and learns node representations that capture both structural properties and temporal evolutionary patterns. Specifically, DySAT computes node representations by jointly employing self-attention layers along two dimensions: structural neighborhood and temporal dynamics. We conduct link prediction experiments on two classes of graphs: communication networks and bipartite rating networks. Our experimental results show that DySAT has a significant performance gain over several different state-of-the-art graph embedding baselines.