3D multi-object tracking (MOT) is essential for an autonomous mobile agent to safely navigate a scene. In order to maximize the perception capabilities of the autonomous agent, we aim to develop a 3D MOT framework that fuses camera and LiDAR sensor information. Building on our prior LiDAR-only work, ShaSTA, which models shape and spatio-temporal affinities for 3D MOT, we propose a novel camera-LiDAR fusion approach for learning affinities. At its core, this work proposes a fusion technique that generates a rich sensory signal incorporating information about depth and distant objects to enhance affinity estimation for improved data association, track lifecycle management, false-positive elimination, false-negative propagation, and track confidence score refinement. Our main contributions include a novel fusion approach for combining camera and LiDAR sensory signals to learn affinities, and a first-of-its-kind multimodal sequential track confidence refinement technique that fuses 2D and 3D detections. Additionally, we perform an ablative analysis on each fusion step to demonstrate the added benefits of incorporating the camera sensor, particular for small, distant objects that tend to suffer from the depth-sensing limits and sparsity of LiDAR sensors. In sum, our technique achieves state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes benchmark amongst multimodal 3D MOT algorithms using CenterPoint detections.
We consider the problem of constraining diffusion model outputs with a user-supplied reference image. Our key objective is to extract multiple attributes (e.g., color, object, layout, style) from this single reference image, and then generate new samples with them. One line of existing work proposes to invert the reference images into a single textual conditioning vector, enabling generation of new samples with this learned token. These methods, however, do not learn multiple tokens that are necessary to condition model outputs on the multiple attributes noted above. Another line of techniques expand the inversion space to learn multiple embeddings but they do this only along the layer dimension (e.g., one per layer of the DDPM model) or the timestep dimension (one for a set of timesteps in the denoising process), leading to suboptimal attribute disentanglement. To address the aforementioned gaps, the first contribution of this paper is an extensive analysis to determine which attributes are captured in which dimension of the denoising process. As noted above, we consider both the time-step dimension (in reverse denoising) as well as the DDPM model layer dimension. We observe that often a subset of these attributes are captured in the same set of model layers and/or across same denoising timesteps. For instance, color and style are captured across same U-Net layers, whereas layout and color are captured across same timestep stages. Consequently, an inversion process that is designed only for the time-step dimension or the layer dimension is insufficient to disentangle all attributes. This leads to our second contribution where we design a new multi-attribute inversion algorithm, MATTE, with associated disentanglement-enhancing regularization losses, that operates across both dimensions and explicitly leads to four disentangled tokens (color, style, layout, and object).
The learn-from-observation (LfO) paradigm is a human-inspired mode for a robot to learn to perform a task simply by watching it being performed. LfO can facilitate robot integration on factory floors by minimizing disruption and reducing tedious programming. A key component of the LfO pipeline is a transformation of the depth camera frames to the corresponding task state and action pairs, which are then relayed to learning techniques such as imitation or inverse reinforcement learning for understanding the task parameters. While several existing computer vision models analyze videos for activity recognition, SA-Net specifically targets robotic LfO from RGB-D data. However, SA-Net and many other models analyze frame data captured from a single viewpoint. Their analysis is therefore highly sensitive to occlusions of the observed task, which are frequent in deployments. An obvious way of reducing occlusions is to simultaneously observe the task from multiple viewpoints and synchronously fuse the multiple streams in the model. Toward this, we present multi-view SA-Net, which generalizes the SA-Net model to allow the perception of multiple viewpoints of the task activity, integrate them, and better recognize the state and action in each frame. Performance evaluations on two distinct domains establish that MVSA-Net recognizes the state-action pairs under occlusion more accurately compared to single-view MVSA-Net and other baselines. Our ablation studies further evaluate its performance under different ambient conditions and establish the contribution of the architecture components. As such, MVSA-Net offers a significantly more robust and deployable state-action trajectory generation compared to previous methods.
By opportunistically engaging mobile users (workers), mobile crowdsensing (MCS) networks have emerged as important approach to facilitate sharing of sensed/gathered data of heterogeneous mobile devices. To assign tasks among workers and ensure low overheads, a series of stable matching mechanisms is introduced in this paper, which are integrated into a novel hybrid service trading paradigm consisting of futures trading mode and spot trading mode to ensure seamless MCS service provisioning. In the futures trading mode, we determine a set of long-term workers for each task through an overbooking-enabled in-advance many-to-many matching (OIA3M) mechanism, while characterizing the associated risks under statistical analysis. In the spot trading mode, we investigate the impact of fluctuations in long-term workers' resources on the violation of service quality requirements of tasks, and formalize a spot trading mode for tasks with violated service quality requirements under practical budget constraints, where the task-worker mapping is carried out via onsite many-to-many matching (O3M) and onsite many-to-one matching (OMOM). We theoretically show that our proposed matching mechanisms satisfy stability, individual rationality, fairness and computational efficiency. Comprehensive evaluations also verify the satisfaction of these properties under practical network settings, while revealing commendable performance on running time, participators' interactions, and service quality.
Finite state machines (FSM's) are implemented with sequential circuits and are used to orchestrate the operation of hardware designs. Sequential obfuscation schemes aimed at preventing IP theft often operate by augmenting a design's FSM post-synthesis. Many such schemes are based on the ability to recover the FSM's topology from the synthesized design. In this paper, we present two tools which can improve the performance of topology extraction: RECUT, which extracts the FSM implementation from a netlist, and REFSM-SAT, which solves topology enumeration as a series of SAT problems. In some cases, these tools can improve performance significantly over current methods, attaining up to a 99\% decrease in runtime.
In the rapidly evolving domain of artificial intelligence, chatbots have emerged as a potent tool for various applications ranging from e-commerce to healthcare. This research delves into the intricacies of chatbot technology, from its foundational concepts to advanced generative models like ChatGPT. We present a comprehensive taxonomy of existing chatbot approaches, distinguishing between rule-based, retrieval-based, generative, and hybrid models. A specific emphasis is placed on ChatGPT, elucidating its merits for frequently asked questions (FAQs)-based chatbots, coupled with an exploration of associated Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques such as named entity recognition, intent classification, and sentiment analysis. The paper further delves into the customization and fine-tuning of ChatGPT, its integration with knowledge bases, and the consequent challenges and ethical considerations that arise. Through real-world applications in domains such as online shopping, healthcare, and education, we underscore the transformative potential of chatbots. However, we also spotlight open challenges and suggest future research directions, emphasizing the need for optimizing conversational flow, advancing dialogue mechanics, improving domain adaptability, and enhancing ethical considerations. The research culminates in a call for further exploration in ensuring transparent, ethical, and user-centric chatbot systems.
Fully supervised change detection methods have achieved significant advancements in performance, yet they depend severely on acquiring costly pixel-level labels. Considering that the patch-level annotations also contain abundant information corresponding to both changed and unchanged objects in bi-temporal images, an intuitive solution is to segment the changes with patch-level annotations. How to capture the semantic variations associated with the changed and unchanged regions from the patch-level annotations to obtain promising change results is the critical challenge for the weakly supervised change detection task. In this paper, we propose a memory-supported transformer (MS-Former), a novel framework consisting of a bi-directional attention block (BAB) and a patch-level supervision scheme (PSS) tailored for weakly supervised change detection with patch-level annotations. More specifically, the BAM captures contexts associated with the changed and unchanged regions from the temporal difference features to construct informative prototypes stored in the memory bank. On the other hand, the BAM extracts useful information from the prototypes as supplementary contexts to enhance the temporal difference features, thereby better distinguishing changed and unchanged regions. After that, the PSS guides the network learning valuable knowledge from the patch-level annotations, thus further elevating the performance. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in the change detection task. The demo code for our work will be publicly available at \url{//github.com/guanyuezhen/MS-Former}.
Autonomic computing investigates how systems can achieve (user) specified control outcomes on their own, without the intervention of a human operator. Autonomic computing fundamentals have been substantially influenced by those of control theory for closed and open-loop systems. In practice, complex systems may exhibit a number of concurrent and inter-dependent control loops. Despite research into autonomic models for managing computer resources, ranging from individual resources (e.g., web servers) to a resource ensemble (e.g., multiple resources within a data center), research into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to improve resource autonomy and performance at scale continues to be a fundamental challenge. The integration of AI/ML to achieve such autonomic and self-management of systems can be achieved at different levels of granularity, from full to human-in-the-loop automation. In this article, leading academics, researchers, practitioners, engineers, and scientists in the fields of cloud computing, AI/ML, and quantum computing join to discuss current research and potential future directions for these fields. Further, we discuss challenges and opportunities for leveraging AI and ML in next generation computing for emerging computing paradigms, including cloud, fog, edge, serverless and quantum computing environments.
Multi-agent influence diagrams (MAIDs) are a popular form of graphical model that, for certain classes of games, have been shown to offer key complexity and explainability advantages over traditional extensive form game (EFG) representations. In this paper, we extend previous work on MAIDs by introducing the concept of a MAID subgame, as well as subgame perfect and trembling hand perfect equilibrium refinements. We then prove several equivalence results between MAIDs and EFGs. Finally, we describe an open source implementation for reasoning about MAIDs and computing their equilibria.
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.
Graph convolutional network (GCN) has been successfully applied to many graph-based applications; however, training a large-scale GCN remains challenging. Current SGD-based algorithms suffer from either a high computational cost that exponentially grows with number of GCN layers, or a large space requirement for keeping the entire graph and the embedding of each node in memory. In this paper, we propose Cluster-GCN, a novel GCN algorithm that is suitable for SGD-based training by exploiting the graph clustering structure. Cluster-GCN works as the following: at each step, it samples a block of nodes that associate with a dense subgraph identified by a graph clustering algorithm, and restricts the neighborhood search within this subgraph. This simple but effective strategy leads to significantly improved memory and computational efficiency while being able to achieve comparable test accuracy with previous algorithms. To test the scalability of our algorithm, we create a new Amazon2M data with 2 million nodes and 61 million edges which is more than 5 times larger than the previous largest publicly available dataset (Reddit). For training a 3-layer GCN on this data, Cluster-GCN is faster than the previous state-of-the-art VR-GCN (1523 seconds vs 1961 seconds) and using much less memory (2.2GB vs 11.2GB). Furthermore, for training 4 layer GCN on this data, our algorithm can finish in around 36 minutes while all the existing GCN training algorithms fail to train due to the out-of-memory issue. Furthermore, Cluster-GCN allows us to train much deeper GCN without much time and memory overhead, which leads to improved prediction accuracy---using a 5-layer Cluster-GCN, we achieve state-of-the-art test F1 score 99.36 on the PPI dataset, while the previous best result was 98.71 by [16]. Our codes are publicly available at //github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/cluster_gcn.