3D detection is a critical task that enables machines to identify and locate objects in three-dimensional space. It has a broad range of applications in several fields, including autonomous driving, robotics and augmented reality. Monocular 3D detection is attractive as it requires only a single camera, however, it lacks the accuracy and robustness required for real world applications. High resolution LiDAR on the other hand, can be expensive and lead to interference problems in heavy traffic given their active transmissions. We propose a balanced approach that combines the advantages of monocular and point cloud-based 3D detection. Our method requires only a small number of 3D points, that can be obtained from a low-cost, low-resolution sensor. Specifically, we use only 512 points, which is just 1% of a full LiDAR frame in the KITTI dataset. Our method reconstructs a complete 3D point cloud from this limited 3D information combined with a single image. The reconstructed 3D point cloud and corresponding image can be used by any multi-modal off-the-shelf detector for 3D object detection. By using the proposed network architecture with an off-the-shelf multi-modal 3D detector, the accuracy of 3D detection improves by 20% compared to the state-of-the-art monocular detection methods and 6% to 9% compare to the baseline multi-modal methods on KITTI and JackRabbot datasets.
Federated learning (FL) allows multiple devices to train a model collaboratively without sharing their data. Despite its benefits, FL is vulnerable to privacy leakage and poisoning attacks. To address the privacy concern, secure aggregation (SecAgg) is often used to obtain the aggregation of gradients on sever without inspecting individual user updates. Unfortunately, existing defense strategies against poisoning attacks rely on the analysis of local updates in plaintext, making them incompatible with SecAgg. To reconcile the conflicts, we propose a robust federated learning framework against poisoning attacks (RFLPA) based on SecAgg protocol. Our framework computes the cosine similarity between local updates and server updates to conduct robust aggregation. Furthermore, we leverage verifiable packed Shamir secret sharing to achieve reduced communication cost of $O(M+N)$ per user, and design a novel dot-product aggregation algorithm to resolve the issue of increased information leakage. Our experimental results show that RFLPA significantly reduces communication and computation overhead by over $75\%$ compared to the state-of-the-art method, BREA, while maintaining competitive accuracy.
PAC-Bayesian analysis is a frequentist framework for incorporating prior knowledge into learning. It was inspired by Bayesian learning, which allows sequential data processing and naturally turns posteriors from one processing step into priors for the next. However, despite two and a half decades of research, the ability to update priors sequentially without losing confidence information along the way remained elusive for PAC-Bayes. While PAC-Bayes allows construction of data-informed priors, the final confidence intervals depend only on the number of points that were not used for the construction of the prior, whereas confidence information in the prior, which is related to the number of points used to construct the prior, is lost. This limits the possibility and benefit of sequential prior updates, because the final bounds depend only on the size of the final batch. We present a novel and, in retrospect, surprisingly simple and powerful PAC-Bayesian procedure that allows sequential prior updates with no information loss. The procedure is based on a novel decomposition of the expected loss of randomized classifiers. The decomposition rewrites the loss of the posterior as an excess loss relative to a downscaled loss of the prior plus the downscaled loss of the prior, which is bounded recursively. As a side result, we also present a generalization of the split-kl and PAC-Bayes-split-kl inequalities to discrete random variables, which we use for bounding the excess losses, and which can be of independent interest. In empirical evaluation the new procedure significantly outperforms state-of-the-art.
Automated driving systems are an integral part of the automotive industry. Tools such as Robot Operating System and simulators support their development. However, in the end, the developers must test their algorithms on a real vehicle. To better observe the difference between reality and simulation--the reality gap--digital twin technology offers real-time communication between the real vehicle and its model. We present low fidelity digital twin generator and describe situations where automatic generation is preferable to high fidelity simulation. We validated our approach of generating a virtual environment with a vehicle model by replaying the data recorded from the real vehicle.
Before deploying outputs from foundation models in high-stakes tasks, it is imperative to ensure that they align with human values. For instance, in radiology report generation, reports generated by a vision-language model must align with human evaluations before their use in medical decision-making. This paper presents Conformal Alignment, a general framework for identifying units whose outputs meet a user-specified alignment criterion. It is guaranteed that on average, a prescribed fraction of selected units indeed meet the alignment criterion, regardless of the foundation model or the data distribution. Given any pre-trained model and new units with model-generated outputs, Conformal Alignment leverages a set of reference data with ground-truth alignment status to train an alignment predictor. It then selects new units whose predicted alignment scores surpass a data-dependent threshold, certifying their corresponding outputs as trustworthy. Through applications to question answering and radiology report generation, we demonstrate that our method is able to accurately identify units with trustworthy outputs via lightweight training over a moderate amount of reference data. En route, we investigate the informativeness of various features in alignment prediction and combine them with standard models to construct the alignment predictor.
Graphs are used widely to model complex systems, and detecting anomalies in a graph is an important task in the analysis of complex systems. Graph anomalies are patterns in a graph that do not conform to normal patterns expected of the attributes and/or structures of the graph. In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been studied extensively and have successfully performed difficult machine learning tasks in node classification, link prediction, and graph classification thanks to the highly expressive capability via message passing in effectively learning graph representations. To solve the graph anomaly detection problem, GNN-based methods leverage information about the graph attributes (or features) and/or structures to learn to score anomalies appropriately. In this survey, we review the recent advances made in detecting graph anomalies using GNN models. Specifically, we summarize GNN-based methods according to the graph type (i.e., static and dynamic), the anomaly type (i.e., node, edge, subgraph, and whole graph), and the network architecture (e.g., graph autoencoder, graph convolutional network). To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the first comprehensive review of graph anomaly detection methods based on GNNs.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
Video instance segmentation (VIS) is the task that requires simultaneously classifying, segmenting and tracking object instances of interest in video. Recent methods typically develop sophisticated pipelines to tackle this task. Here, we propose a new video instance segmentation framework built upon Transformers, termed VisTR, which views the VIS task as a direct end-to-end parallel sequence decoding/prediction problem. Given a video clip consisting of multiple image frames as input, VisTR outputs the sequence of masks for each instance in the video in order directly. At the core is a new, effective instance sequence matching and segmentation strategy, which supervises and segments instances at the sequence level as a whole. VisTR frames the instance segmentation and tracking in the same perspective of similarity learning, thus considerably simplifying the overall pipeline and is significantly different from existing approaches. Without bells and whistles, VisTR achieves the highest speed among all existing VIS models, and achieves the best result among methods using single model on the YouTube-VIS dataset. For the first time, we demonstrate a much simpler and faster video instance segmentation framework built upon Transformers, achieving competitive accuracy. We hope that VisTR can motivate future research for more video understanding tasks.
Traffic forecasting is an important factor for the success of intelligent transportation systems. Deep learning models including convolution neural networks and recurrent neural networks have been applied in traffic forecasting problems to model the spatial and temporal dependencies. In recent years, to model the graph structures in the transportation systems as well as the contextual information, graph neural networks (GNNs) are introduced as new tools and have achieved the state-of-the-art performance in a series of traffic forecasting problems. In this survey, we review the rapidly growing body of recent research using different GNNs, e.g., graph convolutional and graph attention networks, in various traffic forecasting problems, e.g., road traffic flow and speed forecasting, passenger flow forecasting in urban rail transit systems, demand forecasting in ride-hailing platforms, etc. We also present a collection of open data and source resources for each problem, as well as future research directions. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first comprehensive survey that explores the application of graph neural networks for traffic forecasting problems. We have also created a public Github repository to update the latest papers, open data and source resources.
Spectral clustering (SC) is a popular clustering technique to find strongly connected communities on a graph. SC can be used in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to implement pooling operations that aggregate nodes belonging to the same cluster. However, the eigendecomposition of the Laplacian is expensive and, since clustering results are graph-specific, pooling methods based on SC must perform a new optimization for each new sample. In this paper, we propose a graph clustering approach that addresses these limitations of SC. We formulate a continuous relaxation of the normalized minCUT problem and train a GNN to compute cluster assignments that minimize this objective. Our GNN-based implementation is differentiable, does not require to compute the spectral decomposition, and learns a clustering function that can be quickly evaluated on out-of-sample graphs. From the proposed clustering method, we design a graph pooling operator that overcomes some important limitations of state-of-the-art graph pooling techniques and achieves the best performance in several supervised and unsupervised tasks.
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular paradigm for addressing sequential decision tasks in which the agent has only limited environmental feedback. Despite many advances over the past three decades, learning in many domains still requires a large amount of interaction with the environment, which can be prohibitively expensive in realistic scenarios. To address this problem, transfer learning has been applied to reinforcement learning such that experience gained in one task can be leveraged when starting to learn the next, harder task. More recently, several lines of research have explored how tasks, or data samples themselves, can be sequenced into a curriculum for the purpose of learning a problem that may otherwise be too difficult to learn from scratch. In this article, we present a framework for curriculum learning (CL) in reinforcement learning, and use it to survey and classify existing CL methods in terms of their assumptions, capabilities, and goals. Finally, we use our framework to find open problems and suggest directions for future RL curriculum learning research.