The role of a motion planner is pivotal in quadrotor applications, yet existing methods often struggle to adapt to complex environments, limiting their ability to achieve fast, safe, and robust flight. In this letter, we introduce a performance-enhanced quadrotor motion planner designed for autonomous flight in complex environments including dense obstacles, dynamic obstacles, and unknown disturbances. The global planner generates an initial trajectory through kinodynamic path searching and refines it using B-spline trajectory optimization. Subsequently, the local planner takes into account the quadrotor dynamics, estimated disturbance, global reference trajectory, control cost, time cost, and safety constraints to generate real-time control inputs, utilizing the framework of model predictive contouring control. Both simulations and real-world experiments corroborate the heightened robustness, safety, and speed of the proposed motion planner. Additionally, our motion planner achieves flights at more than 6.8 m/s in a challenging and complex racing scenario.
Advancements in model algorithms, the growth of foundational models, and access to high-quality datasets have propelled the evolution of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC). Despite its notable successes, AIGC still faces hurdles such as updating knowledge, handling long-tail data, mitigating data leakage, and managing high training and inference costs. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has recently emerged as a paradigm to address such challenges. In particular, RAG introduces the information retrieval process, which enhances the generation process by retrieving relevant objects from available data stores, leading to higher accuracy and better robustness. In this paper, we comprehensively review existing efforts that integrate RAG technique into AIGC scenarios. We first classify RAG foundations according to how the retriever augments the generator, distilling the fundamental abstractions of the augmentation methodologies for various retrievers and generators. This unified perspective encompasses all RAG scenarios, illuminating advancements and pivotal technologies that help with potential future progress. We also summarize additional enhancements methods for RAG, facilitating effective engineering and implementation of RAG systems. Then from another view, we survey on practical applications of RAG across different modalities and tasks, offering valuable references for researchers and practitioners. Furthermore, we introduce the benchmarks for RAG, discuss the limitations of current RAG systems, and suggest potential directions for future research. Github: //github.com/PKU-DAIR/RAG-Survey.
Change detection as an interdisciplinary discipline in the field of computer vision and remote sensing at present has been receiving extensive attention and research. Due to the rapid development of society, the geographic information captured by remote sensing satellites is changing faster and more complex, which undoubtedly poses a higher challenge and highlights the value of change detection tasks. We propose MFDS-Net: Multi-Scale Feature Depth-Supervised Network for Remote Sensing Change Detection with Global Semantic and Detail Information (MFDS-Net) with the aim of achieving a more refined description of changing buildings as well as geographic information, enhancing the localisation of changing targets and the acquisition of weak features. To achieve the research objectives, we use a modified ResNet_34 as backbone network to perform feature extraction and DO-Conv as an alternative to traditional convolution to better focus on the association between feature information and to obtain better training results. We propose the Global Semantic Enhancement Module (GSEM) to enhance the processing of high-level semantic information from a global perspective. The Differential Feature Integration Module (DFIM) is proposed to strengthen the fusion of different depth feature information, achieving learning and extraction of differential features. The entire network is trained and optimized using a deep supervision mechanism. The experimental outcomes of MFDS-Net surpass those of current mainstream change detection networks. On the LEVIR dataset, it achieved an F1 score of 91.589 and IoU of 84.483, on the WHU dataset, the scores were F1: 92.384 and IoU: 86.807, and on the GZ-CD dataset, the scores were F1: 86.377 and IoU: 76.021. The code is available at //github.com/AOZAKIiii/MFDS-Net
We introduce a new regression framework designed to deal with large-scale, complex data that lies around a low-dimensional manifold with noises. Our approach first constructs a graph representation, referred to as the skeleton, to capture the underlying geometric structure. We then define metrics on the skeleton graph and apply nonparametric regression techniques, along with feature transformations based on the graph, to estimate the regression function. We also discuss the limitations of some nonparametric regressors with respect to the general metric space such as the skeleton graph. The proposed regression framework suggests a novel way to deal with data with underlying geometric structures and provides additional advantages in handling the union of multiple manifolds, additive noises, and noisy observations. We provide statistical guarantees for the proposed method and demonstrate its effectiveness through simulations and real data examples.
Classification of movement trajectories has many applications in transportation. Supervised neural models represent the current state-of-the-art. Recent security applications require this task to be rapidly employed in environments that may differ from the data used to train such models for which there is little training data. We provide a neuro-symbolic rule-based framework to conduct error correction and detection of these models to support eventual deployment in security applications. We provide a suite of experiments on several recent and state-of-the-art models and show an accuracy improvement of 1.7% over the SOTA model in the case where all classes are present in training and when 40% of classes are omitted from training, we obtain a 5.2% improvement (zero-shot) and 23.9% (few-shot) improvement over the SOTA model without resorting to retraining of the base model.
Multi-object tracking (MOT) methods have seen a significant boost in performance recently, due to strong interest from the research community and steadily improving object detection methods. The majority of tracking methods follow the tracking-by-detection (TBD) paradigm, blindly trust the incoming detections with no sense of their associated localization uncertainty. This lack of uncertainty awareness poses a problem in safety-critical tasks such as autonomous driving where passengers could be put at risk due to erroneous detections that have propagated to downstream tasks, including MOT. While there are existing works in probabilistic object detection that predict the localization uncertainty around the boxes, no work in 2D MOT for autonomous driving has studied whether these estimates are meaningful enough to be leveraged effectively in object tracking. We introduce UncertaintyTrack, a collection of extensions that can be applied to multiple TBD trackers to account for localization uncertainty estimates from probabilistic object detectors. Experiments on the Berkeley Deep Drive MOT dataset show that the combination of our method and informative uncertainty estimates reduces the number of ID switches by around 19\% and improves mMOTA by 2-3%. The source code is available at //github.com/TRAILab/UncertaintyTrack
Multi-modal 3D scene understanding has gained considerable attention due to its wide applications in many areas, such as autonomous driving and human-computer interaction. Compared to conventional single-modal 3D understanding, introducing an additional modality not only elevates the richness and precision of scene interpretation but also ensures a more robust and resilient understanding. This becomes especially crucial in varied and challenging environments where solely relying on 3D data might be inadequate. While there has been a surge in the development of multi-modal 3D methods over past three years, especially those integrating multi-camera images (3D+2D) and textual descriptions (3D+language), a comprehensive and in-depth review is notably absent. In this article, we present a systematic survey of recent progress to bridge this gap. We begin by briefly introducing a background that formally defines various 3D multi-modal tasks and summarizes their inherent challenges. After that, we present a novel taxonomy that delivers a thorough categorization of existing methods according to modalities and tasks, exploring their respective strengths and limitations. Furthermore, comparative results of recent approaches on several benchmark datasets, together with insightful analysis, are offered. Finally, we discuss the unresolved issues and provide several potential avenues for future research.
Face recognition technology has advanced significantly in recent years due largely to the availability of large and increasingly complex training datasets for use in deep learning models. These datasets, however, typically comprise images scraped from news sites or social media platforms and, therefore, have limited utility in more advanced security, forensics, and military applications. These applications require lower resolution, longer ranges, and elevated viewpoints. To meet these critical needs, we collected and curated the first and second subsets of a large multi-modal biometric dataset designed for use in the research and development (R&D) of biometric recognition technologies under extremely challenging conditions. Thus far, the dataset includes more than 350,000 still images and over 1,300 hours of video footage of approximately 1,000 subjects. To collect this data, we used Nikon DSLR cameras, a variety of commercial surveillance cameras, specialized long-rage R&D cameras, and Group 1 and Group 2 UAV platforms. The goal is to support the development of algorithms capable of accurately recognizing people at ranges up to 1,000 m and from high angles of elevation. These advances will include improvements to the state of the art in face recognition and will support new research in the area of whole-body recognition using methods based on gait and anthropometry. This paper describes methods used to collect and curate the dataset, and the dataset's characteristics at the current stage.
The incredible development of federated learning (FL) has benefited various tasks in the domains of computer vision and natural language processing, and the existing frameworks such as TFF and FATE has made the deployment easy in real-world applications. However, federated graph learning (FGL), even though graph data are prevalent, has not been well supported due to its unique characteristics and requirements. The lack of FGL-related framework increases the efforts for accomplishing reproducible research and deploying in real-world applications. Motivated by such strong demand, in this paper, we first discuss the challenges in creating an easy-to-use FGL package and accordingly present our implemented package FederatedScope-GNN (FS-G), which provides (1) a unified view for modularizing and expressing FGL algorithms; (2) comprehensive DataZoo and ModelZoo for out-of-the-box FGL capability; (3) an efficient model auto-tuning component; and (4) off-the-shelf privacy attack and defense abilities. We validate the effectiveness of FS-G by conducting extensive experiments, which simultaneously gains many valuable insights about FGL for the community. Moreover, we employ FS-G to serve the FGL application in real-world E-commerce scenarios, where the attained improvements indicate great potential business benefits. We publicly release FS-G, as submodules of FederatedScope, at //github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope to promote FGL's research and enable broad applications that would otherwise be infeasible due to the lack of a dedicated package.
With the advances of data-driven machine learning research, a wide variety of prediction problems have been tackled. It has become critical to explore how machine learning and specifically deep learning methods can be exploited to analyse healthcare data. A major limitation of existing methods has been the focus on grid-like data; however, the structure of physiological recordings are often irregular and unordered which makes it difficult to conceptualise them as a matrix. As such, graph neural networks have attracted significant attention by exploiting implicit information that resides in a biological system, with interactive nodes connected by edges whose weights can be either temporal associations or anatomical junctions. In this survey, we thoroughly review the different types of graph architectures and their applications in healthcare. We provide an overview of these methods in a systematic manner, organized by their domain of application including functional connectivity, anatomical structure and electrical-based analysis. We also outline the limitations of existing techniques and discuss potential directions for future research.
We propose a novel attention gate (AG) model for medical imaging that automatically learns to focus on target structures of varying shapes and sizes. Models trained with AGs implicitly learn to suppress irrelevant regions in an input image while highlighting salient features useful for a specific task. This enables us to eliminate the necessity of using explicit external tissue/organ localisation modules of cascaded convolutional neural networks (CNNs). AGs can be easily integrated into standard CNN architectures such as the U-Net model with minimal computational overhead while increasing the model sensitivity and prediction accuracy. The proposed Attention U-Net architecture is evaluated on two large CT abdominal datasets for multi-class image segmentation. Experimental results show that AGs consistently improve the prediction performance of U-Net across different datasets and training sizes while preserving computational efficiency. The code for the proposed architecture is publicly available.