OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Collective Perception Datasets for Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Review
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

To ensure safe operation of autonomous vehicles in complex urban environments, complete perception of the environment is necessary. However, due to environmental conditions, sensor limitations, and occlusions, this is not always possible from a single point of view. To address this issue, collective perception is an effective method. Realistic and large-scale datasets are essential for training and evaluating collective perception methods. This paper provides the first comprehensive technical review of collective perception datasets in the context of autonomous driving. The survey analyzes existing V2V and V2X datasets, categorizing them based on different criteria such as sensor modalities, environmental conditions, and scenario variety. The focus is on their applicability for the development of connected automated vehicles. This study aims to identify the key criteria of all datasets and to present their strengths, weaknesses, and anomalies. Finally, this survey concludes by making recommendations regarding which dataset is most suitable for collective 3D object detection, tracking, and semantic segmentation.
Robust kernel-free quadratic surface twin support vector machine with capped $L_1$-norm distance metric
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Twin support vector machine (TSVM) is a very classical and practical classifier for pattern classification. However, the traditional TSVM has two limitations. Firstly, it uses the L_2-norm distance metric that leads to its sensitivity to outliers. Second, it needs to select the appropriate kernel function and the kernel parameters for nonlinear classification. To effectively avoid these two problems, this paper proposes a robust capped L_1-norm kernel-free quadratic surface twin support vector machine (CL_1QTSVM). The strengths of our model are briefly summarized as follows. 1) The robustness of our model is further improved by employing the capped L_1 norm distance metric. 2) Our model is a kernel-free method that avoids the time-consuming process of selecting appropriate kernel functions and kernel parameters. 3) The introduction of L_2-norm regularization term to improve the generalization ability of the model. 4) To efficiently solve the proposed model, an iterative algorithm is developed. 5) The convergence, time complexity and existence of locally optimal solutions of the developed algorithms are further discussed. Numerical experiments on numerous types of datasets validate the classification performance and robustness of the proposed model.
UIT-DarkCow team at ImageCLEFmedical Caption 2024: Diagnostic Captioning for Radiology Images Efficiency with Transformer Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Purpose: This study focuses on the development of automated text generation from radiology images, termed diagnostic captioning, to assist medical professionals in reducing clinical errors and improving productivity. The aim is to provide tools that enhance report quality and efficiency, which can significantly impact both clinical practice and deep learning research in the biomedical field. Methods: In our participation in the ImageCLEFmedical2024 Caption evaluation campaign, we explored caption prediction tasks using advanced Transformer-based models. We developed methods incorporating Transformer encoder-decoder and Query Transformer architectures. These models were trained and evaluated to generate diagnostic captions from radiology images. Results: Experimental evaluations demonstrated the effectiveness of our models, with the VisionDiagnostor-BioBART model achieving the highest BERTScore of 0.6267. This performance contributed to our team, DarkCow, achieving third place on the leaderboard. Conclusion: Our diagnostic captioning models show great promise in aiding medical professionals by generating high-quality reports efficiently. This approach can facilitate better data processing and performance optimization in medical imaging departments, ultimately benefiting healthcare delivery.
Structural cohesive element for the modelling of delamination in composite laminates without the cohesive zone limit
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

Delamination is a critical mode of failure that occurs between plies in a composite laminate. The cohesive element, developed based on the cohesive zone model, is widely used for modeling delamination. However, standard cohesive elements suffer from a well-known limit on the mesh density-the element size must be much smaller than the cohesive zone size. This work develops a new set of elements for modelling composite plies and their interfaces in 3D. A triangular Kirchhoff-Love shell element is developed for orthotropic materials to model the plies. A structural cohesive element, conforming to the shell elements of the plies, is developed to model the interface delamination. The proposed method is verified and validated on the classical benchmark problems of Mode I, Mode II, and mixed-mode delamination of unidirectional laminates, as well as on the single-leg bending problem of a multi-directional laminate. All the results show that the element size in the proposed models can be ten times larger than that in the standard cohesive element models, with more than 90% reduction in CPU time, while retaining prediction accuracy. This would then allow more effective and efficient modeling of delamination in composites without worrying about the cohesive zone limit on the mesh density.
SCaRL- A Synthetic Multi-Modal Dataset for Autonomous Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We present a novel synthetically generated multi-modal dataset, SCaRL, to enable the training and validation of autonomous driving solutions. Multi-modal datasets are essential to attain the robustness and high accuracy required by autonomous systems in applications such as autonomous driving. As deep learning-based solutions are becoming more prevalent for object detection, classification, and tracking tasks, there is great demand for datasets combining camera, lidar, and radar sensors. Existing real/synthetic datasets for autonomous driving lack synchronized data collection from a complete sensor suite. SCaRL provides synchronized Synthetic data from RGB, semantic/instance, and depth Cameras; Range-Doppler-Azimuth/Elevation maps and raw data from Radar; and 3D point clouds/2D maps of semantic, depth and Doppler data from coherent Lidar. SCaRL is a large dataset based on the CARLA Simulator, which provides data for diverse, dynamic scenarios and traffic conditions. SCaRL is the first dataset to include synthetic synchronized data from coherent Lidar and MIMO radar sensors. The dataset can be accessed here: https://fhr-ihs-sva.pages.fraunhofer.de/asp/scarl/
Any-step Dynamics Model Improves Future Predictions for Online and Offline Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Model-based methods in reinforcement learning offer a promising approach to enhance data efficiency by facilitating policy exploration within a dynamics model. However, accurately predicting sequential steps in the dynamics model remains a challenge due to the bootstrapping prediction, which attributes the next state to the prediction of the current state. This leads to accumulated errors during model roll-out. In this paper, we propose the Any-step Dynamics Model (ADM) to mitigate the compounding error by reducing bootstrapping prediction to direct prediction. ADM allows for the use of variable-length plans as inputs for predicting future states without frequent bootstrapping. We design two algorithms, ADMPO-ON and ADMPO-OFF, which apply ADM in online and offline model-based frameworks, respectively. In the online setting, ADMPO-ON demonstrates improved sample efficiency compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. In the offline setting, ADMPO-OFF not only demonstrates superior performance compared to recent state-of-the-art offline approaches but also offers better quantification of model uncertainty using only a single ADM.
Interpretable Robotic Manipulation from Language
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Humans naturally employ linguistic instructions to convey knowledge, a process that proves significantly more complex for machines, especially within the context of multitask robotic manipulation environments. Natural language, moreover, serves as the primary medium through which humans acquire new knowledge, presenting a potentially intuitive bridge for translating concepts understandable by humans into formats that can be learned by machines. In pursuit of facilitating this integration, we introduce an explainable behavior cloning agent, named Ex-PERACT, specifically designed for manipulation tasks. This agent is distinguished by its hierarchical structure, which incorporates natural language to enhance the learning process. At the top level, the model is tasked with learning a discrete skill code, while at the bottom level, the policy network translates the problem into a voxelized grid and maps the discretized actions to voxel grids. We evaluate our method across eight challenging manipulation tasks utilizing the RLBench benchmark, demonstrating that Ex-PERACT not only achieves competitive policy performance but also effectively bridges the gap between human instructions and machine execution in complex environments.
BeamVQ: Aligning Space-Time Forecasting Model via Self-training on Physics-aware Metrics
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Data-driven deep learning has emerged as the new paradigm to model complex physical space-time systems. These data-driven methods learn patterns by optimizing statistical metrics and tend to overlook the adherence to physical laws, unlike traditional model-driven numerical methods. Thus, they often generate predictions that are not physically realistic. On the other hand, by sampling a large amount of high quality predictions from a data-driven model, some predictions will be more physically plausible than the others and closer to what will happen in the future. Based on this observation, we propose \emph{Beam search by Vector Quantization} (BeamVQ) to enhance the physical alignment of data-driven space-time forecasting models. The key of BeamVQ is to train model on self-generated samples filtered with physics-aware metrics. To be flexibly support different backbone architectures, BeamVQ leverages a code bank to transform any encoder-decoder model to the continuous state space into discrete codes. Afterwards, it iteratively employs beam search to sample high-quality sequences, retains those with the highest physics-aware scores, and trains model on the new dataset. Comprehensive experiments show that BeamVQ not only gave an average statistical skill score boost for more than 32% for ten backbones on five datasets, but also significantly enhances physics-aware metrics.
Training-free Editioning of Text-to-Image Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Inspired by the software industry's practice of offering different editions or versions of a product tailored to specific user groups or use cases, we propose a novel task, namely, training-free editioning, for text-to-image models. Specifically, we aim to create variations of a base text-to-image model without retraining, enabling the model to cater to the diverse needs of different user groups or to offer distinct features and functionalities. To achieve this, we propose that different editions of a given text-to-image model can be formulated as concept subspaces in the latent space of its text encoder (e.g., CLIP). In such a concept subspace, all points satisfy a specific user need (e.g., generating images of a cat lying on the grass/ground/falling leaves). Technically, we apply Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to obtain the desired concept subspaces from representative text embedding that correspond to a specific user need or requirement. Projecting the text embedding of a given prompt into these low-dimensional subspaces enables efficient model editioning without retraining. Intuitively, our proposed editioning paradigm enables a service provider to customize the base model into its "cat edition" (or other editions) that restricts image generation to cats, regardless of the user's prompt (e.g., dogs, people, etc.). This introduces a new dimension for product differentiation, targeted functionality, and pricing strategies, unlocking novel business models for text-to-image generators. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the validity of our approach and its potential to enable a wide range of customized text-to-image model editions across various domains and applications.
Sok: Comprehensive Security Overview, Challenges, and Future Directions of Voice-Controlled Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The integration of Voice Control Systems (VCS) into smart devices and their growing presence in daily life accentuate the importance of their security. Current research has uncovered numerous vulnerabilities in VCS, presenting significant risks to user privacy and security. However, a cohesive and systematic examination of these vulnerabilities and the corresponding solutions is still absent. This lack of comprehensive analysis presents a challenge for VCS designers in fully understanding and mitigating the security issues within these systems. Addressing this gap, our study introduces a hierarchical model structure for VCS, providing a novel lens for categorizing and analyzing existing literature in a systematic manner. We classify attacks based on their technical principles and thoroughly evaluate various attributes, such as their methods, targets, vectors, and behaviors. Furthermore, we consolidate and assess the defense mechanisms proposed in current research, offering actionable recommendations for enhancing VCS security. Our work makes a significant contribution by simplifying the complexity inherent in VCS security, aiding designers in effectively identifying and countering potential threats, and setting a foundation for future advancements in VCS security research.
PanoTree: Autonomous Photo-Spot Explorer in Virtual Reality Scenes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Social VR platforms enable social, economic, and creative activities by allowing users to create and share their own virtual spaces. In social VR, photography within a VR scene is an important indicator of visitors' activities. Although automatic identification of photo spots within a VR scene can facilitate the process of creating a VR scene and enhance the visitor experience, there are challenges in quantitatively evaluating photos taken in the VR scene and efficiently exploring the large VR scene. We propose PanoTree, an automated photo-spot explorer in VR scenes. To assess the aesthetics of images captured in VR scenes, a deep scoring network is trained on a large dataset of photos collected by a social VR platform to determine whether humans are likely to take similar photos. Furthermore, we propose a Hierarchical Optimistic Optimization (HOO)-based search algorithm to efficiently explore 3D VR spaces with the reward from the scoring network. Our user study shows that the scoring network achieves human-level performance in distinguishing randomly taken images from those taken by humans. In addition, we show applications using the explored photo spots, such as automatic thumbnail generation, support for VR world creation, and visitor flow planning within a VR scene.
Large Language Models (LLMs): Deployment, Tokenomics and Sustainability
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly impacted human-computer interaction, epitomized by the release of GPT-4o, which introduced comprehensive multi-modality capabilities. In this paper, we first explored the deployment strategies, economic considerations, and sustainability challenges associated with the state-of-the-art LLMs. More specifically, we discussed the deployment debate between Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and fine-tuning, highlighting their respective advantages and limitations. After that, we quantitatively analyzed the requirement of xPUs in training and inference. Additionally, for the tokenomics of LLM services, we examined the balance between performance and cost from the quality of experience (QoE)'s perspective of end users. Lastly, we envisioned the future hybrid architecture of LLM processing and its corresponding sustainability concerns, particularly in the environmental carbon footprint impact. Through these discussions, we provided a comprehensive overview of the operational and strategic considerations essential for the responsible development and deployment of LLMs.
DreamMat: High-quality PBR Material Generation with Geometry- and Light-aware Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

2D diffusion model, which often contains unwanted baked-in shading effects and results in unrealistic rendering effects in the downstream applications. Generating Physically Based Rendering (PBR) materials instead of just RGB textures would be a promising solution. However, directly distilling the PBR material parameters from 2D diffusion models still suffers from incorrect material decomposition, such as baked-in shading effects in albedo. We introduce DreamMat, an innovative approach to resolve the aforementioned problem, to generate high-quality PBR materials from text descriptions. We find out that the main reason for the incorrect material distillation is that large-scale 2D diffusion models are only trained to generate final shading colors, resulting in insufficient constraints on material decomposition during distillation. To tackle this problem, we first finetune a new light-aware 2D diffusion model to condition on a given lighting environment and generate the shading results on this specific lighting condition. Then, by applying the same environment lights in the material distillation, DreamMat can generate high-quality PBR materials that are not only consistent with the given geometry but also free from any baked-in shading effects in albedo. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the materials produced through our methods exhibit greater visual appeal to users and achieve significantly superior rendering quality compared to baseline methods, which are preferable for downstream tasks such as game and film production.
How Do Transformers "Do" Physics? Investigating the Simple Harmonic Oscillator
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

How do transformers model physics? Do transformers model systems with interpretable analytical solutions, or do they create "alien physics" that are difficult for humans to decipher? We take a step in demystifying this larger puzzle by investigating the simple harmonic oscillator (SHO), $\ddot{x}+2γ\dot{x}+ω_0^2x=0$, one of the most fundamental systems in physics. Our goal is to identify the methods transformers use to model the SHO, and to do so we hypothesize and evaluate possible methods by analyzing the encoding of these methods' intermediates. We develop four criteria for the use of a method within the simple testbed of linear regression, where our method is $y = wx$ and our intermediate is $w$: (1) Can the intermediate be predicted from hidden states? (2) Is the intermediate's encoding quality correlated with model performance? (3) Can the majority of variance in hidden states be explained by the intermediate? (4) Can we intervene on hidden states to produce predictable outcomes? Armed with these two correlational (1,2), weak causal (3) and strong causal (4) criteria, we determine that transformers use known numerical methods to model trajectories of the simple harmonic oscillator, specifically the matrix exponential method. Our analysis framework can conveniently extend to high-dimensional linear systems and nonlinear systems, which we hope will help reveal the "world model" hidden in transformers.
Learning Generic and Dynamic Locomotion of Humanoids Across Discrete Terrains
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper addresses the challenge of terrain-adaptive dynamic locomotion in humanoid robots, a problem traditionally tackled by optimization-based methods or reinforcement learning (RL). Optimization-based methods, such as model-predictive control, excel in finding optimal reaction forces and achieving agile locomotion, especially in quadruped, but struggle with the nonlinear hybrid dynamics of legged systems and the real-time computation of step location, timing, and reaction forces. Conversely, RL-based methods show promise in navigating dynamic and rough terrains but are limited by their extensive data requirements. We introduce a novel locomotion architecture that integrates a neural network policy, trained through RL in simplified environments, with a state-of-the-art motion controller combining model-predictive control (MPC) and whole-body impulse control (WBIC). The policy efficiently learns high-level locomotion strategies, such as gait selection and step positioning, without the need for full dynamics simulations. This control architecture enables humanoid robots to dynamically navigate discrete terrains, making strategic locomotion decisions (e.g., walking, jumping, and leaping) based on ground height maps. Our results demonstrate that this integrated control architecture achieves dynamic locomotion with significantly fewer training samples than conventional RL-based methods and can be transferred to different humanoid platforms without additional training. The control architecture has been extensively tested in dynamic simulations, accomplishing terrain height-based dynamic locomotion for three different robots.
Opinion-Guided Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Human guidance is often desired in reinforcement learning to improve the performance of the learning agent. However, human insights are often mere opinions and educated guesses rather than well-formulated arguments. While opinions are subject to uncertainty, e.g., due to partial informedness or ignorance about a problem, they also emerge earlier than hard evidence can be produced. Thus, guiding reinforcement learning agents by way of opinions offers the potential for more performant learning processes, but comes with the challenge of modeling and managing opinions in a formal way. In this article, we present a method to guide reinforcement learning agents through opinions. To this end, we provide an end-to-end method to model and manage advisors' opinions. To assess the utility of the approach, we evaluate it with synthetic (oracle) and human advisors, at different levels of uncertainty, and under multiple advice strategies. Our results indicate that opinions, even if uncertain, improve the performance of reinforcement learning agents, resulting in higher rewards, more efficient exploration, and a better reinforced policy. Although we demonstrate our approach through a two-dimensional topological running example, our approach is applicable to complex problems with higher dimensions as well.