We suggest a novel procedure for online change point detection. Our approach expands an idea of maximizing a discrepancy measure between points from pre-change and post-change distributions. This leads to a flexible procedure suitable for both parametric and nonparametric scenarios. We prove non-asymptotic bounds on the average running length of the procedure and its expected detection delay. The efficiency of the algorithm is illustrated with numerical experiments on synthetic and real-world data sets.
Feature matching is a crucial technique in computer vision. Essentially, it can be considered as a searching problem to establish correspondences between images. The key challenge in this task lies in the lack of a well-defined search space, leading to inaccurate point matching of current methods. In pursuit of a reasonable matching search space, this paper introduces a hierarchical feature matching framework: Area to Point Matching (A2PM), to first find semantic area matches between images, and then perform point matching on area matches, thus setting the search space as the area matches with salient features to achieve high matching precision. This proper search space of A2PM framework also alleviates the accuracy limitation in state-of-the-art Transformer-based matching methods. To realize this framework, we further propose Semantic and Geometry Area Matching (SGAM) method, which utilizes semantic prior and geometry consistency to establish accurate area matches between images. By integrating SGAM with off-the-shelf Transformer-based matchers, our feature matching methods, adopting the A2PM framework, achieve encouraging precision improvements in massive point matching and pose estimation experiments for present arts.
We propose a new 6-DoF grasp pose synthesis approach from 2D/2.5D input based on keypoints. Keypoint-based grasp detector from image input has demonstrated promising results in the previous study, where the additional visual information provided by color images compensates for the noisy depth perception. However, it relies heavily on accurately predicting the location of keypoints in the image space. In this paper, we devise a new grasp generation network that reduces the dependency on precise keypoint estimation. Given an RGB-D input, our network estimates both the grasp pose from keypoint detection as well as scale towards the camera. We further re-design the keypoint output space in order to mitigate the negative impact of keypoint prediction noise to Perspective-n-Point (PnP) algorithm. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline by a large margin, validating the efficacy of our approach. Finally, despite trained on simple synthetic objects, our method demonstrate sim-to-real capacity by showing competitive results in real-world robot experiments.
Motivated by a recent literature on the double-descent phenomenon in machine learning, we consider highly over-parametrized models in causal inference, including synthetic control with many control units. In such models, there may be so many free parameters that the model fits the training data perfectly. As a motivating example, we first investigate high-dimensional linear regression for imputing wage data, where we find that models with many more covariates than sample size can outperform simple ones. As our main contribution, we document the performance of high-dimensional synthetic control estimators with many control units. We find that adding control units can help improve imputation performance even beyond the point where the pre-treatment fit is perfect. We then provide a unified theoretical perspective on the performance of these high-dimensional models. Specifically, we show that more complex models can be interpreted as model-averaging estimators over simpler ones, which we link to an improvement in average performance. This perspective yields concrete insights into the use of synthetic control when control units are many relative to the number of pre-treatment periods.
Vector autoregressive (VAR) models are widely used in multivariate time series analysis for describing the short-time dynamics of the data. The reduced-rank VAR models are of particular interest when dealing with high-dimensional and highly correlated time series. Many results for these models are based on the stationarity assumption that does not hold in several applications when the data exhibits structural breaks. We consider a low-rank piecewise stationary VAR model with possible changes in the transition matrix of the observed process. We develop a new test of presence of a change-point in the transition matrix and show its minimax optimality with respect to the dimension and the sample size. Our two-step change-point detection strategy is based on the construction of estimators for the transition matrices and using them in a penalized version of the likelihood ratio test statistic. The effectiveness of the proposed procedure is illustrated on synthetic data.
Bundle adjustment (BA) on LiDAR point clouds has been extensively investigated in recent years due to its ability to optimize multiple poses together, resulting in high accuracy and global consistency for point cloud. However, the accuracy and speed of LiDAR bundle adjustment depend on the quality of plane extraction, which provides point association for LiDAR BA. In this study, we propose a novel and efficient voxel-based approach for plane extraction that is specially designed to provide point association for LiDAR bundle adjustment. To begin, we partition the space into multiple voxels of a fixed size and then split these root voxels based on whether the points are on the same plane, using an octree structure. We also design a novel plane determination method based on principle component analysis (PCA), which segments the points into four even quarters and compare their minimum eigenvalues with that of the initial point cloud. Finally, we adopt a plane merging method to prevent too many small planes from being in a single voxel, which can increase the optimization time required for BA. Our experimental results on HILTI demonstrate that our approach achieves the best precision and least time cost compared to other plane extraction methods.
In this paper, we present a dense hybrid proposal modulation (DHPM) method for lane detection. Most existing methods perform sparse supervision on a subset of high-scoring proposals, while other proposals fail to obtain effective shape and location guidance, resulting in poor overall quality. To address this, we densely modulate all proposals to generate topologically and spatially high-quality lane predictions with discriminative representations. Specifically, we first ensure that lane proposals are physically meaningful by applying single-lane shape and location constraints. Benefitting from the proposed proposal-to-label matching algorithm, we assign each proposal a target ground truth lane to efficiently learn from spatial layout priors. To enhance the generalization and model the inter-proposal relations, we diversify the shape difference of proposals matching the same ground-truth lane. In addition to the shape and location constraints, we design a quality-aware classification loss to adaptively supervise each positive proposal so that the discriminative power can be further boosted. Our DHPM achieves very competitive performances on four popular benchmark datasets. Moreover, we consistently outperform the baseline model on most metrics without introducing new parameters and reducing inference speed.
Detecting an abrupt distributional shift of the data stream, known as change-point detection, is a fundamental problem in statistics and signal processing. We present a new approach for online change-point detection by training neural networks (NN), and sequentially cumulating the detection statistics by evaluating the trained discriminating function on test samples by a CUSUM recursion. The idea is based on the observation that training neural networks through logistic loss may lead to the log-likelihood function. We demonstrated the good performance of NN-CUSUM in the detection of high-dimensional data using both synthetic and real-world data.
With the explosive growth of information technology, multi-view graph data have become increasingly prevalent and valuable. Most existing multi-view clustering techniques either focus on the scenario of multiple graphs or multi-view attributes. In this paper, we propose a generic framework to cluster multi-view attributed graph data. Specifically, inspired by the success of contrastive learning, we propose multi-view contrastive graph clustering (MCGC) method to learn a consensus graph since the original graph could be noisy or incomplete and is not directly applicable. Our method composes of two key steps: we first filter out the undesirable high-frequency noise while preserving the graph geometric features via graph filtering and obtain a smooth representation of nodes; we then learn a consensus graph regularized by graph contrastive loss. Results on several benchmark datasets show the superiority of our method with respect to state-of-the-art approaches. In particular, our simple approach outperforms existing deep learning-based methods.
Generating texts which express complex ideas spanning multiple sentences requires a structured representation of their content (document plan), but these representations are prohibitively expensive to manually produce. In this work, we address the problem of generating coherent multi-sentence texts from the output of an information extraction system, and in particular a knowledge graph. Graphical knowledge representations are ubiquitous in computing, but pose a significant challenge for text generation techniques due to their non-hierarchical nature, collapsing of long-distance dependencies, and structural variety. We introduce a novel graph transforming encoder which can leverage the relational structure of such knowledge graphs without imposing linearization or hierarchical constraints. Incorporated into an encoder-decoder setup, we provide an end-to-end trainable system for graph-to-text generation that we apply to the domain of scientific text. Automatic and human evaluations show that our technique produces more informative texts which exhibit better document structure than competitive encoder-decoder methods.
We introduce a generic framework that reduces the computational cost of object detection while retaining accuracy for scenarios where objects with varied sizes appear in high resolution images. Detection progresses in a coarse-to-fine manner, first on a down-sampled version of the image and then on a sequence of higher resolution regions identified as likely to improve the detection accuracy. Built upon reinforcement learning, our approach consists of a model (R-net) that uses coarse detection results to predict the potential accuracy gain for analyzing a region at a higher resolution and another model (Q-net) that sequentially selects regions to zoom in. Experiments on the Caltech Pedestrians dataset show that our approach reduces the number of processed pixels by over 50% without a drop in detection accuracy. The merits of our approach become more significant on a high resolution test set collected from YFCC100M dataset, where our approach maintains high detection performance while reducing the number of processed pixels by about 70% and the detection time by over 50%.