Scaling to arbitrarily large bundle adjustment problems requires data and compute to be distributed across multiple devices. Centralized methods in prior works are only able to solve small or medium size problems due to overhead in computation and communication. In this paper, we present a fully decentralized method that alleviates computation and communication bottlenecks to solve arbitrarily large bundle adjustment problems. We achieve this by reformulating the reprojection error and deriving a novel surrogate function that decouples optimization variables from different devices. This function makes it possible to use majorization minimization techniques and reduces bundle adjustment to independent optimization subproblems that can be solved in parallel. We further apply Nesterov's acceleration and adaptive restart to improve convergence while maintaining its theoretical guarantees. Despite limited peer-to-peer communication, our method has provable convergence to first-order critical points under mild conditions. On extensive benchmarks with public datasets, our method converges much faster than decentralized baselines with similar memory usage and communication load. Compared to centralized baselines using a single device, our method, while being decentralized, yields more accurate solutions with significant speedups of up to 953.7x over Ceres and 174.6x over DeepLM. Code: //github.com/facebookresearch/DABA.
Dot-product attention mechanism plays a crucial role in modern deep architectures (e.g., Transformer) for sequence modeling, however, na\"ive exact computation of this model incurs quadratic time and memory complexities in sequence length, hindering the training of long-sequence models. Critical bottlenecks are due to the computation of partition functions in the denominator of softmax function as well as the multiplication of the softmax matrix with the matrix of values. Our key observation is that the former can be reduced to a variant of the kernel density estimation (KDE) problem, and an efficient KDE solver can be further utilized to accelerate the latter via subsampling-based fast matrix products. Our proposed KDEformer can approximate the attention in sub-quadratic time with provable spectral norm bounds, while all prior results merely provide entry-wise error bounds. Empirically, we verify that KDEformer outperforms other attention approximations in terms of accuracy, memory, and runtime on various pre-trained models. On BigGAN image generation, we achieve better generative scores than the exact computation with over $4\times$ speedup. For ImageNet classification with T2T-ViT, KDEformer shows over $18\times$ speedup while the accuracy drop is less than $0.5\%$.
Local search is an effective method for solving large-scale combinatorial optimization problems, and it has made remarkable progress in recent years through several subtle mechanisms. In this paper, we found two ways to improve the local search algorithms in solving Pseudo-Boolean Optimization (PBO): Firstly, some of those mechanisms such as unit propagation are merely used in solving MaxSAT before, which can be generalized to solve PBO as well; Secondly, the existing local search algorithms utilize the heuristic on variables, so-called score, to mainly guide the search. We attempt to gain more insights into the clause, as it plays the role of a middleman who builds a bridge between variables and the given formula. Hence, we first extended the combination of unit propagation-based decimation algorithm to PBO problem, giving a further generalized definition of unit clause for PBO problem, and apply it to the existing solver LS-PBO for constructing an initial assignment; then, we introduced a new heuristic on clauses, dubbed care, to set a higher priority for the clauses that are less satisfied in current iterations. Experiments on benchmarks from the most recent PB Competition, as well as three real-world application benchmarks including minimum-width confidence band, wireless sensor network optimization, and seating arrangement problems show that our algorithm DeciLS-PBO has a promising performance compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms.
Spectral clustering is one of the most popular unsupervised machine learning methods. Constructing similarity matrix is crucial to this type of method. In most existing works, the similarity matrix is computed once for all or is updated alternatively. However, the former is difficult to reflect comprehensive relationships among data points, and the latter is time-consuming and is even infeasible for large-scale problems. In this work, we propose a restarted clustering framework with self-guiding and block diagonal representation. An advantage of the strategy is that some useful clustering information obtained from previous cycles could be preserved as much as possible. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that applies restarting strategy to spectral clustering. The key difference is that we reclassify the samples in each cycle of our method, while they are classified only once in existing methods. To further release the overhead, we introduce a block diagonal representation with Nystr\"{o}m approximation for constructing the similarity matrix. Theoretical results are established to show the rationality of inexact computations in spectral clustering. Comprehensive experiments are performed on some benchmark databases, which show the superiority of our proposed algorithms over many state-of-the-art algorithms for large-scale problems. Specifically, our framework has a potential boost for clustering algorithms and works well even using an initial guess chosen randomly.
Camera pose estimation is a long-standing computer vision problem that to date often relies on classical methods, such as handcrafted keypoint matching, RANSAC and bundle adjustment. In this paper, we propose to formulate the Structure from Motion (SfM) problem inside a probabilistic diffusion framework, modelling the conditional distribution of camera poses given input images. This novel view of an old problem has several advantages. (i) The nature of the diffusion framework mirrors the iterative procedure of bundle adjustment. (ii) The formulation allows a seamless integration of geometric constraints from epipolar geometry. (iii) It excels in typically difficult scenarios such as sparse views with wide baselines. (iv) The method can predict intrinsics and extrinsics for an arbitrary amount of images. We demonstrate that our method PoseDiffusion significantly improves over the classic SfM pipelines and the learned approaches on two real-world datasets. Finally, it is observed that our method can generalize across datasets without further training. Project page: //posediffusion.github.io/
Communication delays can be catastrophic for multiagent systems. However, most existing state-of-the-art multiagent trajectory planners assume perfect communication and therefore lack a strategy to rectify this issue in real-world environments. To address this challenge, we propose Robust MADER (RMADER), a decentralized, asynchronous multiagent trajectory planner robust to communication delay. RMADER ensures safety by introducing (1) a Delay Check step, where an agent keeps receiving trajectories from other agents and storing them, and repeatedly checking if its newly optimized trajectory conflicts with other agents' trajectories, and (2) a two-step trajectory publication scheme. We perform an in-depth analysis of trajectory deconfliction, benchmark studies, and hardware experiments with different network topologies and dynamic obstacles. We show that RMADER outperforms existing approaches by achieving a 100% success rate of collision-free trajectory generation, whereas the next best async. decentr. method only achieves 83% success.
Automating warehouse operations can reduce logistics overhead costs, ultimately driving down the final price for consumers, increasing the speed of delivery, and enhancing the resiliency to workforce fluctuations. The past few years have seen increased interest in automating such repeated tasks but mostly in controlled settings. Tasks such as picking objects from unstructured, cluttered piles have only recently become robust enough for large-scale deployment with minimal human intervention. This paper demonstrates a large-scale package manipulation from unstructured piles in Amazon Robotics' Robot Induction (Robin) fleet, which utilizes a pick success predictor trained on real production data. Specifically, the system was trained on over 394K picks. It is used for singulating up to 5 million packages per day and has manipulated over 200 million packages during this paper's evaluation period. The developed learned pick quality measure ranks various pick alternatives in real-time and prioritizes the most promising ones for execution. The pick success predictor aims to estimate from prior experience the success probability of a desired pick by the deployed industrial robotic arms in cluttered scenes containing deformable and rigid objects with partially known properties. It is a shallow machine learning model, which allows us to evaluate which features are most important for the prediction. An online pick ranker leverages the learned success predictor to prioritize the most promising picks for the robotic arm, which are then assessed for collision avoidance. This learned ranking process is demonstrated to overcome the limitations and outperform the performance of manually engineered and heuristic alternatives. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper presents the first large-scale deployment of learned pick quality estimation methods in a real production system.
Lightweight data compression is a key technique that allows column stores to exhibit superior performance for analytical queries. Despite a comprehensive study on dictionary-based encodings to approach Shannon's entropy, few prior works have systematically exploited the serial correlation in a column for compression. In this paper, we propose LeCo (i.e., Learned Compression), a framework that uses machine learning to remove the serial redundancy in a value sequence automatically to achieve an outstanding compression ratio and decompression performance simultaneously. LeCo presents a general approach to this end, making existing (ad-hoc) algorithms such as Frame-of-Reference (FOR), Delta Encoding, and Run-Length Encoding (RLE) special cases under our framework. Our microbenchmark with three synthetic and six real-world data sets shows that a prototype of LeCo achieves a Pareto improvement on both compression ratio and random access speed over the existing solutions. When integrating LeCo into widely-used applications, we observe up to 3.9x speed up in filter-scanning a Parquet file and a 16% increase in Rocksdb's throughput.
In this paper, we consider the network slicing (NS) problem which attempts to map multiple customized virtual network requests to a common shared network infrastructure and allocate network resources to meet diverse service requirements. We propose an efficient decomposition algorithm for solving this NP-hard problem. The proposed algorithm decomposes the large-scale hard NS problem into two relatively easy function placement (FP) and traffic routing (TR) subproblems and iteratively solves them enabling information feedback between each other, which makes it particularly suitable to solve large-scale problems. Specifically, the FP subproblem is to place service functions into cloud nodes in the network, and solving it can return a function placement strategy based on which the TR subproblem is defined; and the TR subproblem is to find paths connecting two nodes hosting two adjacent functions in the network, and solving it can either verify that the solution of the FP subproblem is an optimal solution of the original problem, or return a valid inequality to the FP subproblem that cuts off the current infeasible solution. The proposed algorithm is guaranteed to find the global solution of the NS problem. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm via numerical experiments.
We study the problem of locally private mean estimation of high-dimensional vectors in the Euclidean ball. Existing algorithms for this problem either incur sub-optimal error or have high communication and/or run-time complexity. We propose a new algorithmic framework, ProjUnit, for private mean estimation that yields algorithms that are computationally efficient, have low communication complexity, and incur optimal error up to a $1+o(1)$-factor. Our framework is deceptively simple: each randomizer projects its input to a random low-dimensional subspace, normalizes the result, and then runs an optimal algorithm such as PrivUnitG in the lower-dimensional space. In addition, we show that, by appropriately correlating the random projection matrices across devices, we can achieve fast server run-time. We mathematically analyze the error of the algorithm in terms of properties of the random projections, and study two instantiations. Lastly, our experiments for private mean estimation and private federated learning demonstrate that our algorithms empirically obtain nearly the same utility as optimal ones while having significantly lower communication and computational cost.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been extensively studied in the past few years. Arguably their most significant impact has been in the area of computer vision where great advances have been made in challenges such as plausible image generation, image-to-image translation, facial attribute manipulation and similar domains. Despite the significant successes achieved to date, applying GANs to real-world problems still poses significant challenges, three of which we focus on here. These are: (1) the generation of high quality images, (2) diversity of image generation, and (3) stable training. Focusing on the degree to which popular GAN technologies have made progress against these challenges, we provide a detailed review of the state of the art in GAN-related research in the published scientific literature. We further structure this review through a convenient taxonomy we have adopted based on variations in GAN architectures and loss functions. While several reviews for GANs have been presented to date, none have considered the status of this field based on their progress towards addressing practical challenges relevant to computer vision. Accordingly, we review and critically discuss the most popular architecture-variant, and loss-variant GANs, for tackling these challenges. Our objective is to provide an overview as well as a critical analysis of the status of GAN research in terms of relevant progress towards important computer vision application requirements. As we do this we also discuss the most compelling applications in computer vision in which GANs have demonstrated considerable success along with some suggestions for future research directions. Code related to GAN-variants studied in this work is summarized on //github.com/sheqi/GAN_Review.