Distribution-to-Distribution (D2D) point cloud registration algorithms are fast, interpretable, and perform well in unstructured environments. Unfortunately, existing strategies for predicting solution error for these methods are overly optimistic, particularly in regions containing large or extended physical objects. In this paper we introduce the Iterative Closest Ellipsoidal Transform (ICET), a novel 3D LIDAR scan-matching algorithm that re-envisions NDT in order to provide robust accuracy prediction from first principles. Like NDT, ICET subdivides a LIDAR scan into voxels in order to analyze complex scenes by considering many smaller local point distributions, however, ICET assesses the voxel distribution to distinguish random noise from deterministic structure. ICET then uses a weighted least-squares formulation to incorporate this noise/structure distinction into computing a localization solution and predicting the solution-error covariance. In order to demonstrate the reasonableness of our accuracy predictions, we verify 3D ICET in three LIDAR tests involving real-world automotive data, high-fidelity simulated trajectories, and simulated corner-case scenes. For each test, ICET consistently performs scan matching with sub-centimeter accuracy. This level of accuracy, combined with the fact that the algorithm is fully interpretable, make it well suited for safety-critical transportation applications. Code is available at //github.com/mcdermatt/ICET
Point clouds are naturally sparse, while image pixels are dense. The inconsistency limits feature fusion from both modalities for point-wise scene flow estimation. Previous methods rarely predict scene flow from the entire point clouds of the scene with one-time inference due to the memory inefficiency and heavy overhead from distance calculation and sorting involved in commonly used farthest point sampling, KNN, and ball query algorithms for local feature aggregation. To mitigate these issues in scene flow learning, we regularize raw points to a dense format by storing 3D coordinates in 2D grids. Unlike the sampling operation commonly used in existing works, the dense 2D representation 1) preserves most points in the given scene, 2) brings in a significant boost of efficiency, and 3) eliminates the density gap between points and pixels, allowing us to perform effective feature fusion. We also present a novel warping projection technique to alleviate the information loss problem resulting from the fact that multiple points could be mapped into one grid during projection when computing cost volume. Sufficient experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our method, outperforming the prior-arts on the FlyingThings3D and KITTI dataset.
SecureBoost is a tree-boosting algorithm leveraging homomorphic encryption to protect data privacy in vertical federated learning setting. It is widely used in fields such as finance and healthcare due to its interpretability, effectiveness, and privacy-preserving capability. However, SecureBoost suffers from high computational complexity and risk of label leakage. To harness the full potential of SecureBoost, hyperparameters of SecureBoost should be carefully chosen to strike an optimal balance between utility, efficiency, and privacy. Existing methods either set hyperparameters empirically or heuristically, which are far from optimal. To fill this gap, we propose a Constrained Multi-Objective SecureBoost (CMOSB) algorithm to find Pareto optimal solutions that each solution is a set of hyperparameters achieving optimal tradeoff between utility loss, training cost, and privacy leakage. We design measurements of the three objectives. In particular, the privacy leakage is measured using our proposed instance clustering attack. Experimental results demonstrate that the CMOSB yields not only hyperparameters superior to the baseline but also optimal sets of hyperparameters that can support the flexible requirements of FL participants.
State-space models (SSMs) are commonly used to model time series data where the observations depend on an unobserved latent process. However, inference on the model parameters of an SSM can be challenging, especially when the likelihood of the data given the parameters is not available in closed-form. One approach is to jointly sample the latent states and model parameters via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and/or sequential Monte Carlo approximation. These methods can be inefficient, mixing poorly when there are many highly correlated latent states or parameters, or when there is a high rate of sample impoverishment in the sequential Monte Carlo approximations. We propose a novel block proposal distribution for Metropolis-within-Gibbs sampling on the joint latent state and parameter space. The proposal distribution is informed by a deterministic hidden Markov model (HMM), defined such that the usual theoretical guarantees of MCMC algorithms apply. We discuss how the HMMs are constructed, the generality of the approach arising from the tuning parameters, and how these tuning parameters can be chosen efficiently in practice. We demonstrate that the proposed algorithm using HMM approximations provides an efficient alternative method for fitting state-space models, even for those that exhibit near-chaotic behavior.
Implicit graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a potential approach to enable GNNs to capture long-range dependencies effectively. However, poorly designed implicit GNN layers can experience over-smoothing or may have limited adaptability to learn data geometry, potentially hindering their performance in graph learning problems. To address these issues, we introduce a geometric framework to design implicit graph diffusion layers based on a parameterized graph Laplacian operator. Our framework allows learning the geometry of vertex and edge spaces, as well as the graph gradient operator from data. We further show how implicit GNN layers can be viewed as the fixed-point solution of a Dirichlet energy minimization problem and give conditions under which it may suffer from over-smoothing. To overcome the over-smoothing problem, we design our implicit graph diffusion layer as the solution of a Dirichlet energy minimization problem with constraints on vertex features, enabling it to trade off smoothing with the preservation of node feature information. With an appropriate hyperparameter set to be larger than the largest eigenvalue of the parameterized graph Laplacian, our framework guarantees a unique equilibrium and quick convergence. Our models demonstrate better performance than leading implicit and explicit GNNs on benchmark datasets for node and graph classification tasks, with substantial accuracy improvements observed for some datasets.
We investigate transductive zero-shot point cloud semantic segmentation, where the network is trained on seen objects and able to segment unseen objects. The 3D geometric elements are essential cues to imply a novel 3D object type. However, previous methods neglect the fine-grained relationship between the language and the 3D geometric elements. To this end, we propose a novel framework to learn the geometric primitives shared in seen and unseen categories' objects and employ a fine-grained alignment between language and the learned geometric primitives. Therefore, guided by language, the network recognizes the novel objects represented with geometric primitives. Specifically, we formulate a novel point visual representation, the similarity vector of the point's feature to the learnable prototypes, where the prototypes automatically encode geometric primitives via back-propagation. Besides, we propose a novel Unknown-aware InfoNCE Loss to fine-grained align the visual representation with language. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in the harmonic mean-intersection-over-union (hIoU), with the improvement of 17.8\%, 30.4\%, 9.2\% and 7.9\% on S3DIS, ScanNet, SemanticKITTI and nuScenes datasets, respectively. Codes are available (//github.com/runnanchen/Zero-Shot-Point-Cloud-Segmentation)
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.
Cold-start problems are long-standing challenges for practical recommendations. Most existing recommendation algorithms rely on extensive observed data and are brittle to recommendation scenarios with few interactions. This paper addresses such problems using few-shot learning and meta learning. Our approach is based on the insight that having a good generalization from a few examples relies on both a generic model initialization and an effective strategy for adapting this model to newly arising tasks. To accomplish this, we combine the scenario-specific learning with a model-agnostic sequential meta-learning and unify them into an integrated end-to-end framework, namely Scenario-specific Sequential Meta learner (or s^2 meta). By doing so, our meta-learner produces a generic initial model through aggregating contextual information from a variety of prediction tasks while effectively adapting to specific tasks by leveraging learning-to-learn knowledge. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model can achieve significant gains over the state-of-the-arts for cold-start problems in online recommendation. Deployment is at the Guess You Like session, the front page of the Mobile Taobao.
Collaborative filtering often suffers from sparsity and cold start problems in real recommendation scenarios, therefore, researchers and engineers usually use side information to address the issues and improve the performance of recommender systems. In this paper, we consider knowledge graphs as the source of side information. We propose MKR, a Multi-task feature learning approach for Knowledge graph enhanced Recommendation. MKR is a deep end-to-end framework that utilizes knowledge graph embedding task to assist recommendation task. The two tasks are associated by cross&compress units, which automatically share latent features and learn high-order interactions between items in recommender systems and entities in the knowledge graph. We prove that cross&compress units have sufficient capability of polynomial approximation, and show that MKR is a generalized framework over several representative methods of recommender systems and multi-task learning. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that MKR achieves substantial gains in movie, book, music, and news recommendation, over state-of-the-art baselines. MKR is also shown to be able to maintain a decent performance even if user-item interactions are sparse.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.