This paper studies the cost-performance tradeoffs in cloud robotics with heterogeneous cloud service providers, which have complex pricing models and varying application requirements. We present FogROS2-Sky, a cost-efficient open source robotics platform that offloads unmodified ROS2 applications to multiple cloud providers and enables fine-grained cost analysis for ROS2 applications' communication with multiple cloud providers. As each provider offers different options for CPU, GPU, memory, and latency, it can be very difficult for users to decide which to choose. FogROS2-Sky includes an optimization algorithm, which either finds the best available hardware specification that fulfills the user's latency and cost constraints or reports that such a specification does not exist. We use FogROS2-Sky to perform time-cost analysis on three robotics applications: visual SLAM, grasp planning, and motion planning. We are able to sample different hardware setups at nearly half the cost while still create cost and latency functions suitable for the optimizer. We also evaluate the optimizer's efficacy for these applications with the Pareto frontier and show that the optimizer selects efficient hardware configurations to balance cost and latency. Videos and code are available on the website //sites.google.com/view/fogros2-sky
This paper presents a comprehensive survey of low-light image and video enhancement, addressing two primary challenges in the field. The first challenge is the prevalence of mixed over-/under-exposed images, which are not adequately addressed by existing methods. In response, this work introduces two enhanced variants of the SICE dataset: SICE_Grad and SICE_Mix, designed to better represent these complexities. The second challenge is the scarcity of suitable low-light video datasets for training and testing. To address this, the paper introduces the Night Wenzhou dataset, a large-scale, high-resolution video collection that features challenging fast-moving aerial scenes and streetscapes with varied illuminations and degradation. This study also conducts an extensive analysis of key techniques and performs comparative experiments using the proposed and current benchmark datasets. The survey concludes by highlighting emerging applications, discussing unresolved challenges, and suggesting future research directions within the LLIE community. The datasets are available at //github.com/ShenZheng2000/LLIE_Survey.
3D point cloud semantic segmentation has a wide range of applications. Recently, weakly supervised point cloud segmentation methods have been proposed, aiming to alleviate the expensive and laborious manual annotation process by leveraging scene-level labels. However, these methods have not effectively exploited the rich geometric information (such as shape and scale) and appearance information (such as color and texture) present in RGB-D scans. Furthermore, current approaches fail to fully leverage the point affinity that can be inferred from the feature extraction network, which is crucial for learning from weak scene-level labels. Additionally, previous work overlooks the detrimental effects of the long-tailed distribution of point cloud data in weakly supervised 3D semantic segmentation. To this end, this paper proposes a simple yet effective scene-level weakly supervised point cloud segmentation method with a newly introduced multi-modality point affinity inference module. The point affinity proposed in this paper is characterized by features from multiple modalities (e.g., point cloud and RGB), and is further refined by normalizing the classifier weights to alleviate the detrimental effects of long-tailed distribution without the need of the prior of category distribution. Extensive experiments on the ScanNet and S3DIS benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, which outperforms the state-of-the-art by ~4% to ~6% mIoU. Codes are released at //github.com/Sunny599/AAAI24-3DWSSG-MMA.
This paper addresses the privacy and security concerns associated with deep neural language models, which serve as crucial components in various modern AI-based applications. These models are often used after being pre-trained and fine-tuned for specific tasks, with deployment on servers accessed through the internet. However, this introduces two fundamental risks: (a) the transmission of user inputs to the server via the network gives rise to interception vulnerabilities, and (b) privacy concerns emerge as organizations that deploy such models store user data with restricted context. To address this, we propose a novel method to adapt and fine-tune transformer-based language models on passkey-encrypted user-specific text. The original pre-trained language model first undergoes a quick adaptation (without any further pre-training) with a series of irreversible transformations applied to the tokenizer and token embeddings. This enables the model to perform inference on encrypted inputs while preventing reverse engineering of text from model parameters and intermediate outputs. After adaptation, models are fine-tuned on encrypted versions of existing training datasets. Experimental evaluation employing adapted versions of renowned models (e.g., BERT, RoBERTa) across established benchmark English and multilingual datasets for text classification and sequence labeling shows that encrypted models achieve performance parity with their original counterparts. This serves to safeguard performance, privacy, and security cohesively.
As the landscape of time-sensitive applications gains prominence in 5G/6G communications, timeliness of information updates at network nodes has become crucial, which is popularly quantified in the literature by the age of information metric. However, as we devise policies to improve age of information of our systems, we inadvertently introduce a new vulnerability for adversaries to exploit. In this article, we comprehensively discuss the diverse threats that age-based systems are vulnerable to. We begin with discussion on densely interconnected networks that employ gossiping between nodes to expedite dissemination of dynamic information in the network, and show how the age-based nature of gossiping renders these networks uniquely susceptible to threats such as timestomping attacks, jamming attacks, and the propagation of misinformation. Later, we survey adversarial works within simpler network settings, specifically in one-hop and two-hop configurations, and delve into adversarial robustness concerning challenges posed by jamming, timestomping, and issues related to privacy leakage. We conclude this article with future directions that aim to address challenges posed by more intelligent adversaries and robustness of networks to them.
This research paper addresses the challenges of exploration and navigation in unknown environments from an evolutionary swarm robotics perspective. Path formation plays a crucial role in enabling cooperative swarm robots to accomplish these tasks. The paper presents a method called the sub-goal-based path formation, which establishes a path between two different locations by exploiting visually connected sub-goals. Simulation experiments conducted in the Argos simulator demonstrate the successful formation of paths in the majority of trials. Furthermore, the paper tackles the problem of inter-collision (traffic) among a large number of robots engaged in path formation, which negatively impacts the performance of the sub-goal-based method. To mitigate this issue, a task allocation strategy is proposed, leveraging local communication protocols and light signal-based communication. The strategy evaluates the distance between points and determines the required number of robots for the path formation task, reducing unwanted exploration and traffic congestion. The performance of the sub-goal-based path formation and task allocation strategy is evaluated by comparing path length, time, and resource reduction against the A* algorithm. The simulation experiments demonstrate promising results, showcasing the scalability, robustness, and fault tolerance characteristics of the proposed approach.
Owing to effective and flexible data acquisition, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has recently become a hotspot across the fields of computer vision (CV) and remote sensing (RS). Inspired by recent success of deep learning (DL), many advanced object detection and tracking approaches have been widely applied to various UAV-related tasks, such as environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, traffic management. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the research progress and prospects of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods. More specifically, we first outline the challenges, statistics of existing methods, and provide solutions from the perspectives of DL-based models in three research topics: object detection from the image, object detection from the video, and object tracking from the video. Open datasets related to UAV-dominated object detection and tracking are exhausted, and four benchmark datasets are employed for performance evaluation using some state-of-the-art methods. Finally, prospects and considerations for the future work are discussed and summarized. It is expected that this survey can facilitate those researchers who come from remote sensing field with an overview of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods, along with some thoughts on their further developments.
Point cloud-based large scale place recognition is fundamental for many applications like Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Although many models have been proposed and have achieved good performance by learning short-range local features, long-range contextual properties have often been neglected. Moreover, the model size has also become a bottleneck for their wide applications. To overcome these challenges, we propose a super light-weight network model termed SVT-Net for large scale place recognition. Specifically, on top of the highly efficient 3D Sparse Convolution (SP-Conv), an Atom-based Sparse Voxel Transformer (ASVT) and a Cluster-based Sparse Voxel Transformer (CSVT) are proposed to learn both short-range local features and long-range contextual features in this model. Consisting of ASVT and CSVT, SVT-Net can achieve state-of-the-art on benchmark datasets in terms of both accuracy and speed with a super-light model size (0.9M). Meanwhile, two simplified versions of SVT-Net are introduced, which also achieve state-of-the-art and further reduce the model size to 0.8M and 0.4M respectively.
Recommender systems exploit interaction history to estimate user preference, having been heavily used in a wide range of industry applications. However, static recommendation models are difficult to answer two important questions well due to inherent shortcomings: (a) What exactly does a user like? (b) Why does a user like an item? The shortcomings are due to the way that static models learn user preference, i.e., without explicit instructions and active feedback from users. The recent rise of conversational recommender systems (CRSs) changes this situation fundamentally. In a CRS, users and the system can dynamically communicate through natural language interactions, which provide unprecedented opportunities to explicitly obtain the exact preference of users. Considerable efforts, spread across disparate settings and applications, have been put into developing CRSs. Existing models, technologies, and evaluation methods for CRSs are far from mature. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of the techniques used in current CRSs. We summarize the key challenges of developing CRSs into five directions: (1) Question-based user preference elicitation. (2) Multi-turn conversational recommendation strategies. (3) Dialogue understanding and generation. (4) Exploitation-exploration trade-offs. (5) Evaluation and user simulation. These research directions involve multiple research fields like information retrieval (IR), natural language processing (NLP), and human-computer interaction (HCI). Based on these research directions, we discuss some future challenges and opportunities. We provide a road map for researchers from multiple communities to get started in this area. We hope this survey helps to identify and address challenges in CRSs and inspire future research.
We study the problem of efficient semantic segmentation for large-scale 3D point clouds. By relying on expensive sampling techniques or computationally heavy pre/post-processing steps, most existing approaches are only able to be trained and operate over small-scale point clouds. In this paper, we introduce RandLA-Net, an efficient and lightweight neural architecture to directly infer per-point semantics for large-scale point clouds. The key to our approach is to use random point sampling instead of more complex point selection approaches. Although remarkably computation and memory efficient, random sampling can discard key features by chance. To overcome this, we introduce a novel local feature aggregation module to progressively increase the receptive field for each 3D point, thereby effectively preserving geometric details. Extensive experiments show that our RandLA-Net can process 1 million points in a single pass with up to 200X faster than existing approaches. Moreover, our RandLA-Net clearly surpasses state-of-the-art approaches for semantic segmentation on two large-scale benchmarks Semantic3D and SemanticKITTI.
This paper proposes a recommender system to alleviate the cold-start problem that can estimate user preferences based on only a small number of items. To identify a user's preference in the cold state, existing recommender systems, such as Netflix, initially provide items to a user; we call those items evidence candidates. Recommendations are then made based on the items selected by the user. Previous recommendation studies have two limitations: (1) the users who consumed a few items have poor recommendations and (2) inadequate evidence candidates are used to identify user preferences. We propose a meta-learning-based recommender system called MeLU to overcome these two limitations. From meta-learning, which can rapidly adopt new task with a few examples, MeLU can estimate new user's preferences with a few consumed items. In addition, we provide an evidence candidate selection strategy that determines distinguishing items for customized preference estimation. We validate MeLU with two benchmark datasets, and the proposed model reduces at least 5.92% mean absolute error than two comparative models on the datasets. We also conduct a user study experiment to verify the evidence selection strategy.