Carbon footprint quantification is key to well-informed decision making over carbon reduction potential, both for individuals and for companies. Many carbon footprint case studies for products and services have been circulated recently. Due to the complex relationships within each scenario, however, the underlying assumptions often are difficult to understand. Also, re-using and adapting a scenario to local or individual circumstances is not a straightforward task. To overcome these challenges, we propose an open and linked data model for carbon footprint scenarios which improves data quality and transparency by design. We demonstrate the implementation of our idea with a web-based data interpreter prototype.
The safe control of multi-robot swarms is a challenging and active field of research, where common goals include maintaining group cohesion while simultaneously avoiding obstacles and inter-agent collision. Building off our previously developed theory for distributed collaborative safety-critical control for networked dynamic systems, we propose a distributed algorithm for the formation control of robot swarms given individual agent dynamics, induced formation dynamics, and local neighborhood position and velocity information within a defined sensing radius for each agent. Individual safety guarantees for each agent are obtained using rounds of communication between neighbors to restrict unsafe control actions among cooperating agents through safety conditions derived from high-order control barrier functions (CBFs). We provide conditions under which a swarm is guaranteed to achieve collective safety with respect to multiple obstacles using a modified collaborative safety algorithm. We demonstrate the performance of our distributed algorithm via simulation in a simplified physics-based environment.
Human-level driving is an ultimate goal of autonomous driving. Conventional approaches formulate autonomous driving as a perception-prediction-planning framework, yet their systems do not capitalize on the inherent reasoning ability and experiential knowledge of humans. In this paper, we propose a fundamental paradigm shift from current pipelines, exploiting Large Language Models (LLMs) as a cognitive agent to integrate human-like intelligence into autonomous driving systems. Our approach, termed Agent-Driver, transforms the traditional autonomous driving pipeline by introducing a versatile tool library accessible via function calls, a cognitive memory of common sense and experiential knowledge for decision-making, and a reasoning engine capable of chain-of-thought reasoning, task planning, motion planning, and self-reflection. Powered by LLMs, our Agent-Driver is endowed with intuitive common sense and robust reasoning capabilities, thus enabling a more nuanced, human-like approach to autonomous driving. We evaluate our approach on the large-scale nuScenes benchmark, and extensive experiments substantiate that our Agent-Driver significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art driving methods by a large margin. Our approach also demonstrates superior interpretability and few-shot learning ability to these methods. Project page: \href{//github.com/USC-GVL/Agent-Driver/blob/main/index.html}{here}.
Quantum entanglement is a crucial resource in quantum information processing. However, quantifying the entanglement required to prepare quantum states and implement quantum processes remains challenging. This paper proposes computable and faithful lower bounds for the entanglement cost of general quantum states and quantum channels. We introduce the concept of logarithmic $k$-negativity, a generalization of logarithmic negativity, to establish a general lower bound for the entanglement cost of quantum states under quantum operations that completely preserve the positivity of partial transpose (PPT). This bound is efficiently computable via semidefinite programming and is non-zero for any entangled state that is not PPT, making it faithful in the entanglement theory with non-positive partial transpose. Furthermore, we delve into specific and general examples to demonstrate the advantages of our proposed bounds compared with previously known computable ones. Notably, we affirm the irreversibility of asymptotic entanglement manipulation under PPT operations for full-rank entangled states and the irreversibility of channel manipulation for amplitude damping channels. We also establish the best-known lower bound for the entanglement cost of arbitrary dimensional isotropic states. These findings push the boundaries of understanding the structure of entanglement and the fundamental limits of entanglement manipulation.
We consider the problem of detecting causal relationships between discrete time series, in the presence of potential confounders. A hypothesis test is introduced for identifying the temporally causal influence of $(x_n)$ on $(y_n)$, causally conditioned on a possibly confounding third time series $(z_n)$. Under natural Markovian modeling assumptions, it is shown that the null hypothesis, corresponding to the absence of temporally causal influence, is equivalent to the underlying `causal conditional directed information rate' being equal to zero. The plug-in estimator for this functional is identified with the log-likelihood ratio test statistic for the desired test. This statistic is shown to be asymptotically normal under the alternative hypothesis and asymptotically $\chi^2$ distributed under the null, facilitating the computation of $p$-values when used on empirical data. The effectiveness of the resulting hypothesis test is illustrated on simulated data, validating the underlying theory. The test is also employed in the analysis of spike train data recorded from neurons in the V4 and FEF brain regions of behaving animals during a visual attention task. There, the test results are seen to identify interesting and biologically relevant information.
The task of estimating 3D occupancy from surrounding-view images is an exciting development in the field of autonomous driving, following the success of Bird's Eye View (BEV) perception. This task provides crucial 3D attributes of the driving environment, enhancing the overall understanding and perception of the surrounding space. In this work, we present a simple framework for 3D occupancy estimation, which is a CNN-based framework designed to reveal several key factors for 3D occupancy estimation, such as network design, optimization, and evaluation. In addition, we explore the relationship between 3D occupancy estimation and other related tasks, such as monocular depth estimation and 3D reconstruction, which could advance the study of 3D perception in autonomous driving. For evaluation, we propose a simple sampling strategy to define the metric for occupancy evaluation, which is flexible for current public datasets. Moreover, we establish the benchmark in terms of the depth estimation metric, where we compare our proposed method with monocular depth estimation methods on the DDAD and Nuscenes datasets and achieve competitive performance. The relevant code will be updated in //github.com/GANWANSHUI/SimpleOccupancy.
Class distribution skews in imbalanced datasets may lead to models with prediction bias towards majority classes, making fair assessment of classifiers a challenging task. Metrics such as Balanced Accuracy are commonly used to evaluate a classifier's prediction performance under such scenarios. However, these metrics fall short when classes vary in importance. In this paper, we propose a simple and general-purpose evaluation framework for imbalanced data classification that is sensitive to arbitrary skews in class cardinalities and importances. Experiments with several state-of-the-art classifiers tested on real-world datasets from three different domains show the effectiveness of our framework - not only in evaluating and ranking classifiers, but also training them.
Nonuniform families of polynomial-size finite automata, which are series of indexed finite automata having polynomially many inner states, are used in the past literature to solve nonuniform families of promise decision problems. Among such nonuniform families of finite automata, we focus our attention, in particular, on the variants of nondeterministic finite automata, which have at most "one" (unambiguous), "polynomially many" (few) accepting computation paths, or unambiguous/few computation paths leading to each fixed configuration. When such machines are limited to make only one-way head moves, we can prove with no unproven hardness assumptions that some of these variants are different in computational power from each other. As for two-way machines restricted to instances of polynomially-bounded length, families of two-way polynomial-size nondeterministic finite automata are equivalent in power to families of polynomial-size unambiguous finite automata.
Image-level weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) is a fundamental yet challenging computer vision task facilitating scene understanding and automatic driving. Most existing methods resort to classification-based Class Activation Maps (CAMs) to play as the initial pseudo labels, which tend to focus on the discriminative image regions and lack customized characteristics for the segmentation task. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel activation modulation and recalibration (AMR) scheme, which leverages a spotlight branch and a compensation branch to obtain weighted CAMs that can provide recalibration supervision and task-specific concepts. Specifically, an attention modulation module (AMM) is employed to rearrange the distribution of feature importance from the channel-spatial sequential perspective, which helps to explicitly model channel-wise interdependencies and spatial encodings to adaptively modulate segmentation-oriented activation responses. Furthermore, we introduce a cross pseudo supervision for dual branches, which can be regarded as a semantic similar regularization to mutually refine two branches. Extensive experiments show that AMR establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, surpassing not only current methods trained with the image-level of supervision but also some methods relying on stronger supervision, such as saliency label. Experiments also reveal that our scheme is plug-and-play and can be incorporated with other approaches to boost their performance.
Benefit from the quick development of deep learning techniques, salient object detection has achieved remarkable progresses recently. However, there still exists following two major challenges that hinder its application in embedded devices, low resolution output and heavy model weight. To this end, this paper presents an accurate yet compact deep network for efficient salient object detection. More specifically, given a coarse saliency prediction in the deepest layer, we first employ residual learning to learn side-output residual features for saliency refinement, which can be achieved with very limited convolutional parameters while keep accuracy. Secondly, we further propose reverse attention to guide such side-output residual learning in a top-down manner. By erasing the current predicted salient regions from side-output features, the network can eventually explore the missing object parts and details which results in high resolution and accuracy. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods, and with advantages in terms of simplicity, efficiency (45 FPS) and model size (81 MB).
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.