OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
AdaLIO: Robust Adaptive LiDAR-Inertial Odometry in Degenerate Indoor Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, the demand for mapping construction sites or buildings using light detection and ranging~(LiDAR) sensors has been increased to model environments for efficient site management. However, it is observed that sometimes LiDAR-based approaches diverge in narrow and confined environments, such as spiral stairs and corridors, caused by fixed parameters regardless of the changes in the environments. That is, the parameters of LiDAR (-inertial) odometry are mostly set for open space; thus, if the same parameters suitable for the open space are applied in a corridor-like scene, it results in divergence of odometry methods, which is referred to as \textit{degeneracy}. To tackle this degeneracy problem, we propose a robust LiDAR inertial odometry called \textit{AdaLIO}, which employs an adaptive parameter setting strategy. To this end, we first check the degeneracy by checking whether the surroundings are corridor-like environments. If so, the parameters relevant to voxelization and normal vector estimation are adaptively changed to increase the number of correspondences. As verified in a public dataset, our proposed method showed promising performance in narrow and cramped environments, avoiding the degeneracy problem.
MF-NeRF: Memory Efficient NeRF with Mixed-Feature Hash Table
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Neural radiance field (NeRF) has shown remarkable performance in generating photo-realistic novel views. Among recent NeRF related research, the approaches that involve the utilization of explicit structures like grids to manage features achieve exceptionally fast training by reducing the complexity of multilayer perceptron (MLP) networks. However, storing features in dense grids demands a substantial amount of memory space, resulting in a notable memory bottleneck within computer system. Consequently, it leads to a significant increase in training times without prior hyper-parameter tuning. To address this issue, in this work, we are the first to propose MF-NeRF, a memory-efficient NeRF framework that employs a Mixed-Feature hash table to improve memory efficiency and reduce training time while maintaining reconstruction quality. Specifically, we first design a mixed-feature hash encoding to adaptively mix part of multi-level feature grids and map it to a single hash table. Following that, in order to obtain the correct index of a grid point, we further develop an index transformation method that transforms indices of an arbitrary level grid to those of a canonical grid. Extensive experiments benchmarking with state-of-the-art Instant-NGP, TensoRF, and DVGO, indicate our MF-NeRF could achieve the fastest training time on the same GPU hardware with similar or even higher reconstruction quality.
Unsupervised Synthetic Image Refinement via Contrastive Learning and Consistent Semantic-Structural Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Ensuring the realism of computer-generated synthetic images is crucial to deep neural network (DNN) training. Due to different semantic distributions between synthetic and real-world captured datasets, there exists semantic mismatch between synthetic and refined images, which in turn results in the semantic distortion. Recently, contrastive learning (CL) has been successfully used to pull correlated patches together and push uncorrelated ones apart. In this work, we exploit semantic and structural consistency between synthetic and refined images and adopt CL to reduce the semantic distortion. Besides, we incorporate hard negative mining to improve the performance furthermore. We compare the performance of our method with several other benchmarking methods using qualitative and quantitative measures and show that our method offers the state-of-the-art performance.
Generalist Vision Foundation Models for Medical Imaging: A Case Study of Segment Anything Model on Zero-Shot Medical Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we examine the recent Segment Anything Model (SAM) on medical images, and report both quantitative and qualitative zero-shot segmentation results on nine medical image segmentation benchmarks, covering various imaging modalities, such as optical coherence tomography (OCT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and computed tomography (CT), as well as different applications including dermatology, ophthalmology, and radiology. Those benchmarks are representative and commonly used in model development. Our experimental results indicate that while SAM presents remarkable segmentation performance on images from the general domain, its zero-shot segmentation ability remains restricted for out-of-distribution images, e.g., medical images. In addition, SAM exhibits inconsistent zero-shot segmentation performance across different unseen medical domains. For certain structured targets, e.g., blood vessels, the zero-shot segmentation of SAM completely failed. In contrast, a simple fine-tuning of it with a small amount of data could lead to remarkable improvement of the segmentation quality, showing the great potential and feasibility of using fine-tuned SAM to achieve accurate medical image segmentation for a precision diagnostics. Our study indicates the versatility of generalist vision foundation models on medical imaging, and their great potential to achieve desired performance through fine-turning and eventually address the challenges associated with accessing large and diverse medical datasets in support of clinical diagnostics.
What does BERT learn about prosody?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Language models have become nearly ubiquitous in natural language processing applications achieving state-of-the-art results in many tasks including prosody. As the model design does not define predetermined linguistic targets during training but rather aims at learning generalized representations of the language, analyzing and interpreting the representations that models implicitly capture is important in bridging the gap between interpretability and model performance. Several studies have explored the linguistic information that models capture providing some insights on their representational capacity. However, the current studies have not explored whether prosody is part of the structural information of the language that models learn. In this work, we perform a series of experiments on BERT probing the representations captured at different layers. Our results show that information about prosodic prominence spans across many layers but is mostly focused in middle layers suggesting that BERT relies mostly on syntactic and semantic information.
Proximal Curriculum for Reinforcement Learning Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We consider the problem of curriculum design for reinforcement learning (RL) agents in contextual multi-task settings. Existing techniques on automatic curriculum design typically require domain-specific hyperparameter tuning or have limited theoretical underpinnings. To tackle these limitations, we design our curriculum strategy, ProCuRL, inspired by the pedagogical concept of Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). ProCuRL captures the intuition that learning progress is maximized when picking tasks that are neither too hard nor too easy for the learner. We mathematically derive ProCuRL by analyzing two simple learning settings. We also present a practical variant of ProCuRL that can be directly integrated with deep RL frameworks with minimal hyperparameter tuning. Experimental results on a variety of domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our curriculum strategy over state-of-the-art baselines in accelerating the training process of deep RL agents.
Discovering Graph Generation Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We provide a novel approach to construct generative models for graphs. Instead of using the traditional probabilistic models or deep generative models, we propose to instead find an algorithm that generates the data. We achieve this using evolutionary search and a powerful fitness function, implemented by a randomly initialized graph neural network. This brings certain advantages over current deep generative models, for instance, a higher potential for out-of-training-distribution generalization and direct interpretability, as the final graph generative process is expressed as a Python function. We show that this approach can be competitive with deep generative models and under some circumstances can even find the true graph generative process, and as such perfectly generalize.
Direct Collocation Methods for Trajectory Optimization in Constrained Robotic Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Direct collocation methods are powerful tools to solve trajectory optimization problems in robotics. While their resulting trajectories tend to be dynamically accurate, they may also present large kinematic errors in the case of constrained mechanical systems, i.e., those whose state coordinates are subject to holonomic or nonholonomic constraints, like loop-closure or rolling-contact constraints. These constraints confine the robot trajectories to an implicitly-defined manifold, which complicates the computation of accurate solutions. Discretization errors inherent to the transcription of the problem easily make the trajectories drift away from this manifold, which results in physically inconsistent motions that are difficult to track with a controller. This paper reviews existing methods to deal with this problem and proposes new ones to overcome their limitations. Current approaches either disregard the kinematic constraints (which leads to drift accumulation) or modify the system dynamics to keep the trajectory close to the manifold (which adds artificial forces or energy dissipation to the system). The methods we propose, in contrast, achieve full drift elimination on the discrete trajectory, or even along the continuous one, without artificial modifications of the system dynamics. We illustrate and compare the methods using various examples of different complexity.
Positive Data Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2023
Year: 2023

Positive data languages are languages over an infinite alphabet closed under possibly non-injective renamings of data values. Informally, they model properties of data words expressible by assertions about equality, but not inequality, of data values occurring in the word. We investigate the class of positive data languages recognizable by nondeterministic orbit-finite nominal automata, an abstract form of register automata introduced by Bojańczyk, Klin, and Lasota. As our main contribution we provide a number of equivalent characterizations of that class in terms of positive register automata, monadic second-order logic with positive equality tests, and finitely presentable nondeterministic automata in the categories of nominal renaming sets and of presheaves over finite sets.
A Closer Look at Reward Decomposition for High-Level Robotic Explanations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Explaining the behaviour of intelligent agents learned by reinforcement learning (RL) to humans is challenging yet crucial due to their incomprehensible proprioceptive states, variational intermediate goals, and resultant unpredictability. Moreover, one-step explanations for RL agents can be ambiguous as they fail to account for the agent's future behaviour at each transition, adding to the complexity of explaining robot actions. By leveraging abstracted actions that map to task-specific primitives, we avoid explanations on the movement level. To further improve the transparency and explainability of robotic systems, we propose an explainable Q-Map learning framework that combines reward decomposition (RD) with abstracted action spaces, allowing for non-ambiguous and high-level explanations based on object properties in the task. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework through quantitative and qualitative analysis of two robotic scenarios, showcasing visual and textual explanations, from output artefacts of RD explanations, that are easy for humans to comprehend. Additionally, we demonstrate the versatility of integrating these artefacts with large language models (LLMs) for reasoning and interactive querying.
Quantifying the Effect of Image Similarity on Diabetic Foot Ulcer Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This research conducts an investigation on the effect of visually similar images within a publicly available diabetic foot ulcer dataset when training deep learning classification networks. The presence of binary-identical duplicate images in datasets used to train deep learning algorithms is a well known issue that can introduce unwanted bias which can degrade network performance. However, the effect of visually similar non-identical images is an under-researched topic, and has so far not been investigated in any diabetic foot ulcer studies. We use an open-source fuzzy algorithm to identify groups of increasingly similar images in the Diabetic Foot Ulcers Challenge 2021 (DFUC2021) training dataset. Based on each similarity threshold, we create new training sets that we use to train a range of deep learning multi-class classifiers. We then evaluate the performance of the best performing model on the DFUC2021 test set. Our findings show that the model trained on the training set with the 80\% similarity threshold images removed achieved the best performance using the InceptionResNetV2 network. This model showed improvements in F1-score, precision, and recall of 0.023, 0.029, and 0.013, respectively. These results indicate that highly similar images can contribute towards the presence of performance degrading bias within the Diabetic Foot Ulcers Challenge 2021 dataset, and that the removal of images that are 80\% similar from the training set can help to boost classification performance.
ChatLLM Network: More brains, More intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Dialogue-based language models mark a huge milestone in the field of artificial intelligence, by their impressive ability to interact with users, as well as a series of challenging tasks prompted by customized instructions. However, the prevalent large-scale dialogue-based language models like ChatGPT still have room for improvement, such as unstable responses to questions and the inability to think cooperatively like humans. Considering the ability of dialogue-based language models in conversation and their inherent randomness in thinking, we propose ChatLLM network that allows multiple dialogue-based language models to interact, provide feedback, and think together. We design the network of ChatLLMs based on ChatGPT. Specifically, individual instances of ChatGPT may possess distinct perspectives towards the same problem, and by consolidating these diverse viewpoints via a separate ChatGPT, the ChatLLM network system can conduct decision-making more objectively and comprehensively. In addition, a language-based feedback mechanism comparable to backpropagation is devised to update the ChatGPTs within the network. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate that our network attains significant improvements in problem-solving, leading to observable progress amongst each member.
DuETT: Dual Event Time Transformer for Electronic Health Records
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Electronic health records (EHRs) recorded in hospital settings typically contain a wide range of numeric time series data that is characterized by high sparsity and irregular observations. Effective modelling for such data must exploit its time series nature, the semantic relationship between different types of observations, and information in the sparsity structure of the data. Self-supervised Transformers have shown outstanding performance in a variety of structured tasks in NLP and computer vision. But multivariate time series data contains structured relationships over two dimensions: time and recorded event type, and straightforward applications of Transformers to time series data do not leverage this distinct structure. The quadratic scaling of self-attention layers can also significantly limit the input sequence length without appropriate input engineering. We introduce the DuETT architecture, an extension of Transformers designed to attend over both time and event type dimensions, yielding robust representations from EHR data. DuETT uses an aggregated input where sparse time series are transformed into a regular sequence with fixed length; this lowers the computational complexity relative to previous EHR Transformer models and, more importantly, enables the use of larger and deeper neural networks. When trained with self-supervised prediction tasks, that provide rich and informative signals for model pre-training, our model outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning models on multiple downstream tasks from the MIMIC-IV and PhysioNet-2012 EHR datasets.
Diffusion Probabilistic Model Based Accurate and High-Degree-of-Freedom Metasurface Inverse Design
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Conventional meta-atom designs rely heavily on researchers' prior knowledge and trial-and-error searches using full-wave simulations, resulting in time-consuming and inefficient processes. Inverse design methods based on optimization algorithms, such as evolutionary algorithms, and topological optimizations, have been introduced to design metamaterials. However, none of these algorithms are general enough to fulfill multi-objective tasks. Recently, deep learning methods represented by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been applied to inverse design of metamaterials, which can directly generate high-degree-of-freedom meta-atoms based on S-parameter requirements. However, the adversarial training process of GANs makes the network unstable and results in high modeling costs. This paper proposes a novel metamaterial inverse design method based on the diffusion probability theory. By learning the Markov process that transforms the original structure into a Gaussian distribution, the proposed method can gradually remove the noise starting from the Gaussian distribution and generate new high-degree-of-freedom meta-atoms that meet S-parameter conditions, which avoids the model instability introduced by the adversarial training process of GANs and ensures more accurate and high-quality generation results. Experiments have proven that our method is superior to representative methods of GANs in terms of model convergence speed, generation accuracy, and quality.
AI-Synthesized Voice Detection Using Neural Vocoder Artifacts
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

Advancements in AI-synthesized human voices have created a growing threat of impersonation and disinformation, making it crucial to develop methods to detect synthetic human voices. This study proposes a new approach to identifying synthetic human voices by detecting artifacts of vocoders in audio signals. Most DeepFake audio synthesis models use a neural vocoder, a neural network that generates waveforms from temporal-frequency representations like mel-spectrograms. By identifying neural vocoder processing in audio, we can determine if a sample is synthesized. To detect synthetic human voices, we introduce a multi-task learning framework for a binary-class RawNet2 model that shares the feature extractor with a vocoder identification module. By treating vocoder identification as a pretext task, we constrain the feature extractor to focus on vocoder artifacts and provide discriminative features for the final binary classifier. Our experiments show that the improved RawNet2 model based on vocoder identification achieves high classification performance on the binary task overall.
Time-Selective RNN for Device-Free Multi-Room Human Presence Detection Using WiFi CSI
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Device-free human presence detection is a crucial technology for various applications, including home automation, security, and healthcare. While camera-based systems have traditionally been used for this purpose, they raise privacy concerns. To address this issue, recent research has explored the use of wireless channel state information (CSI) extracted from commercial WiFi access points (APs) to provide detailed channel characteristics. In this paper, we propose a device-free human presence detection system for multi-room scenarios using a time-selective conditional dual feature extract recurrent network (TCD-FERN). Our system is designed to capture significant time features on current human features using a dynamic and static data preprocessing technique. We extract both moving and spatial features of people and differentiate between line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) cases. Subcarrier fusion is carried out in order to provide more objective variation of each sample while reducing the computational complexity. A voting scheme is further adopted to mitigate the feature attenuation problem caused by room partitions, with around 3% improvement of human presence detection accuracy. Experimental results have revealed the significant improvement of leveraging subcarrier fusion, dual-feature recurrent network, time selection and condition mechanisms. Compared to the existing works in open literature, our proposed TCD-FERN system can achieve above 97% of human presence detection accuracy for multi-room scenarios with the adoption of fewer WiFi APs.
LumiGAN: Unconditional Generation of Relightable 3D Human Faces
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Unsupervised learning of 3D human faces from unstructured 2D image data is an active research area. While recent works have achieved an impressive level of photorealism, they commonly lack control of lighting, which prevents the generated assets from being deployed in novel environments. To this end, we introduce LumiGAN, an unconditional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for 3D human faces with a physically based lighting module that enables relighting under novel illumination at inference time. Unlike prior work, LumiGAN can create realistic shadow effects using an efficient visibility formulation that is learned in a self-supervised manner. LumiGAN generates plausible physical properties for relightable faces, including surface normals, diffuse albedo, and specular tint without any ground truth data. In addition to relightability, we demonstrate significantly improved geometry generation compared to state-of-the-art non-relightable 3D GANs and notably better photorealism than existing relightable GANs.
Generating Procedural Materials from Text or Image Prompts
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2023
Year: 2023

Node graph systems are used ubiquitously for material design in computer graphics. They allow the use of visual programming to achieve desired effects without writing code. As high-level design tools they provide convenience and flexibility, but mastering the creation of node graphs usually requires professional training. We propose an algorithm capable of generating multiple node graphs from different types of prompts, significantly lowering the bar for users to explore a specific design space. Previous work was limited to unconditional generation of random node graphs, making the generation of an envisioned material challenging. We propose a multi-modal node graph generation neural architecture for high-quality procedural material synthesis which can be conditioned on different inputs (text or image prompts), using a CLIP-based encoder. We also create a substantially augmented material graph dataset, key to improving the generation quality. Finally, we generate high-quality graph samples using a regularized sampling process and improve the matching quality by differentiable optimization for top-ranked samples. We compare our methods to CLIP-based database search baselines (which are themselves novel) and achieve superior or similar performance without requiring massive data storage. We further show that our model can produce a set of material graphs unconditionally, conditioned on images, text prompts or partial graphs, serving as a tool for automatic visual programming completion.