pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Typesafe Coordinate Systems in High-Throughput Sequencing Applications
Authors: Charles Thomas Gregory, James S. Blachly
Date: 2022-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

High-throughput sequencing file formats and tools encode coordinate intervals with respect to a reference sequence in at least four distinct, incompatible ways. Integrating data from and moving data between different formats has the potential to introduce subtle off-by-one errors. Here, we introduce the notion of typesafe coordinates: coordinate intervals are not only an integer pair, but members of a type class comprising four types: the Cartesian product of a zero or one basis, and an open or closed interval end. By leveraging the type system of statically and strongly-typed, compiled languages we can provide static guarantees that an entire class of error is eliminated. We provide a reference implementation in D as part of a larger work (dhtslib), and proofs of concept in Rust, OCaml, and Python. Exploratory implementations are available at https://github.com/blachlylab/typesafe-coordinates.
Finding Common Ground for Incoherent Horn Expressions
Authors: Ana Ozaki, Anum Rehman, Philip Turk, Marija Slavkovik
Date: 2022-09-14 00:00:00

Autonomous systems that operate in a shared environment with people need to be able to follow the rules of the society they occupy. While laws are unique for one society, different people and institutions may use different rules to guide their conduct. We study the problem of reaching a common ground among possibly incoherent rules of conduct. We formally define a notion of common ground and discuss the main properties of this notion. Then, we identify three sufficient conditions on the class of Horn expressions for which common grounds are guaranteed to exist. We provide a polynomial time algorithm that computes common grounds, under these conditions. We also show that if any of the three conditions is removed then common grounds for the resulting (larger) class may not exist.
Learning to Evaluate Performance of Multi-modal Semantic Localization
Authors: Zhiqiang Yuan, Wenkai Zhang, Chongyang Li, Zhaoying Pan, Yongqiang Mao, Jialiang Chen, Shouke Li, Hongqi Wang, Xian Sun
Date: 2022-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Modal Retrieval, Referring Expression, Referring Expression Comprehension, Retrieval

Semantic localization (SeLo) refers to the task of obtaining the most relevant locations in large-scale remote sensing (RS) images using semantic information such as text. As an emerging task based on cross-modal retrieval, SeLo achieves semantic-level retrieval with only caption-level annotation, which demonstrates its great potential in unifying downstream tasks. Although SeLo has been carried out successively, but there is currently no work has systematically explores and analyzes this urgent direction. In this paper, we thoroughly study this field and provide a complete benchmark in terms of metrics and testdata to advance the SeLo task. Firstly, based on the characteristics of this task, we propose multiple discriminative evaluation metrics to quantify the performance of the SeLo task. The devised significant area proportion, attention shift distance, and discrete attention distance are utilized to evaluate the generated SeLo map from pixel-level and region-level. Next, to provide standard evaluation data for the SeLo task, we contribute a diverse, multi-semantic, multi-objective Semantic Localization Testset (AIR-SLT). AIR-SLT consists of 22 large-scale RS images and 59 test cases with different semantics, which aims to provide a comprehensive evaluations for retrieval models. Finally, we analyze the SeLo performance of RS cross-modal retrieval models in detail, explore the impact of different variables on this task, and provide a complete benchmark for the SeLo task. We have also established a new paradigm for RS referring expression comprehension, and demonstrated the great advantage of SeLo in semantics through combining it with tasks such as detection and road extraction. The proposed evaluation metrics, semantic localization testsets, and corresponding scripts have been open to access at github.com/xiaoyuan1996/SemanticLocalizationMetrics .
ImageArg: A Multi-modal Tweet Dataset for Image Persuasiveness Mining
Authors: Zhexiong Liu, Meiqi Guo, Yue Dai, Diane Litman
Date: 2022-09-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: ArgMining (ACL) 2022 10
Tasks: Argument Mining, Persuasiveness

The growing interest in developing corpora of persuasive texts has promoted applications in automated systems, e.g., debating and essay scoring systems; however, there is little prior work mining image persuasiveness from an argumentative perspective. To expand persuasiveness mining into a multi-modal realm, we present a multi-modal dataset, ImageArg, consisting of annotations of image persuasiveness in tweets. The annotations are based on a persuasion taxonomy we developed to explore image functionalities and the means of persuasion. We benchmark image persuasiveness tasks on ImageArg using widely-used multi-modal learning methods. The experimental results show that our dataset offers a useful resource for this rich and challenging topic, and there is ample room for modeling improvement.
Look Before You Leap: Improving Text-based Person Retrieval by Learning A Consistent Cross-modal Common Manifold
Authors: Zijie Wang, Aichun Zhu, Jingyi Xue, Xili Wan, Chao Liu, Tian Wang, Yifeng Li
Date: 2022-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Person Retrieval, Retrieval, Text based Person Retrieval, Text-based Person Retrieval

The core problem of text-based person retrieval is how to bridge the heterogeneous gap between multi-modal data. Many previous approaches contrive to learning a latent common manifold mapping paradigm following a \textbf{cross-modal distribution consensus prediction (CDCP)} manner. When mapping features from distribution of one certain modality into the common manifold, feature distribution of the opposite modality is completely invisible. That is to say, how to achieve a cross-modal distribution consensus so as to embed and align the multi-modal features in a constructed cross-modal common manifold all depends on the experience of the model itself, instead of the actual situation. With such methods, it is inevitable that the multi-modal data can not be well aligned in the common manifold, which finally leads to a sub-optimal retrieval performance. To overcome this \textbf{CDCP dilemma}, we propose a novel algorithm termed LBUL to learn a Consistent Cross-modal Common Manifold (C$^{3}$M) for text-based person retrieval. The core idea of our method, just as a Chinese saying goes, is to `\textit{san si er hou xing}', namely, to \textbf{Look Before yoU Leap (LBUL)}. The common manifold mapping mechanism of LBUL contains a looking step and a leaping step. Compared to CDCP-based methods, LBUL considers distribution characteristics of both the visual and textual modalities before embedding data from one certain modality into C$^{3}$M to achieve a more solid cross-modal distribution consensus, and hence achieve a superior retrieval accuracy. We evaluate our proposed method on two text-based person retrieval datasets CUHK-PEDES and RSTPReid. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LBUL outperforms previous methods and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.
Joint User and Data Detection in Grant-Free NOMA with Attention-based BiLSTM Network
Authors: Saud Khan, Salman Durrani, Muhammad Basit Shahab, Sarah J. Johnson, Seyit Camtepe
Date: 2022-09-14 00:00:00

We consider the multi-user detection (MUD) problem in uplink grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), where the access point has to identify the total number and correct identity of the active Internet of Things (IoT) devices and decode their transmitted data. We assume that IoT devices use complex spreading sequences and transmit information in a random-access manner following the burst-sparsity model, where some IoT devices transmit their data in multiple adjacent time slots with a high probability, while others transmit only once during a frame. Exploiting the temporal correlation, we propose an attention-based bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) network to solve the MUD problem. The BiLSTM network creates a pattern of the device activation history using forward and reverse pass LSTMs, whereas the attention mechanism provides essential context to the device activation points. By doing so, a hierarchical pathway is followed for detecting active devices in a grant-free scenario. Then, by utilising the complex spreading sequences, blind data detection for the estimated active devices is performed. The proposed framework does not require prior knowledge of device sparsity levels and channels for performing MUD. The results show that the proposed network achieves better performance compared to existing benchmark schemes.
Analytics and Machine Learning Powered Wireless Network Optimization and Planning
Authors: Ying Li, Djordje Tujkovic, Po-Han Huang
Date: 2022-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

It is important that the wireless network is well optimized and planned, using the limited wireless spectrum resources, to serve the explosively growing traffic and diverse applications needs of end users. Considering the challenges of dynamics and complexity of the wireless systems, and the scale of the networks, it is desirable to have solutions to automatically monitor, analyze, optimize, and plan the network. This article discusses approaches and solutions of data analytics and machine learning powered optimization and planning. The approaches include analyzing some important metrics of performances and experiences, at the lower layers and upper layers of open systems interconnection (OSI) model, as well as deriving a metric of the end user perceived network congestion indicator. The approaches include monitoring and diagnosis such as anomaly detection of the metrics, root cause analysis for poor performances and experiences. The approaches include enabling network optimization with tuning recommendations, directly targeting to optimize the end users experiences, via sensitivity modeling and analysis of the upper layer metrics of the end users experiences v.s. the improvement of the lower layers metrics due to tuning the hardware configurations. The approaches also include deriving predictive metrics for network planning, traffic demand distributions and trends, detection and prediction of the suppressed traffic demand, and the incentives of traffic gains if the network is upgraded. These approaches of optimization and planning are for accurate detection of optimization and upgrading opportunities at a large scale, enabling more effective optimization and planning such as tuning cells configurations, upgrading cells capacity with more advanced technologies or new hardware, adding more cells, etc., improving the network performances and providing better experiences to end users.
Safe Autonomous Docking Maneuvers for a Floating Platform based on Input Sharing Control Barrier Functions
Authors: Akshit Saradagi, Avijit Banerjee, Sumeet Satpute, George Nikolakopoulos
Date: 2022-09-14 00:00:00

In this article, we present a control strategy for the problem of safe autonomous docking for a planar floating platform (Slider) that emulates the movement of a satellite. Employing the proposed strategy, Slider approaches a docking port with the right orientation, maintaining a safe distance, while always keeping a visual lock on the docking port throughout the docking maneuver. Control barrier functions are designed to impose the safety, direction of approach and visual locking constraints. Three control inputs of the Slider are shared among three barrier functions in enforcing the constraints. It is proved that the control inputs are shared in a conflict-free manner in rendering the sets defining safety and visual locking constraints forward invariant and in establishing finite-time convergence to the visual locking mode. The conflict-free input-sharing ensures the feasibility of a quadratic program that generates minimally-invasive corrections for a nominal controller, that is designed to track the docking port, so that the barrier constraints are respected throughout the docking maneuver. The efficacy of the proposed control design approach is validated through various simulations.
Data-Efficient Collaborative Decentralized Thermal-Inertial Odometry
Authors: Vincenzo Polizzi, Robert Hewitt, Javier Hidalgo-Carrió, Jeff Delaune, Davide Scaramuzza
Date: 2022-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: State Estimation

We propose a system solution to achieve data-efficient, decentralized state estimation for a team of flying robots using thermal images and inertial measurements. Each robot can fly independently, and exchange data when possible to refine its state estimate. Our system front-end applies an online photometric calibration to refine the thermal images so as to enhance feature tracking and place recognition. Our system back-end uses a covariance-intersection fusion strategy to neglect the cross-correlation between agents so as to lower memory usage and computational cost. The communication pipeline uses Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors (VLAD) to construct a request-response policy that requires low bandwidth usage. We test our collaborative method on both synthetic and real-world data. Our results show that the proposed method improves by up to 46 % trajectory estimation with respect to an individual-agent approach, while reducing up to 89 % the communication exchange. Datasets and code are released to the public, extending the already-public JPL xVIO library.
CRAFT: Camera-Radar 3D Object Detection with Spatio-Contextual Fusion Transformer
Authors: Youngseok Kim, Sanmin Kim, Jun Won Choi, Dongsuk Kum
Date: 2022-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, object-detection, Object Detection

Camera and radar sensors have significant advantages in cost, reliability, and maintenance compared to LiDAR. Existing fusion methods often fuse the outputs of single modalities at the result-level, called the late fusion strategy. This can benefit from using off-the-shelf single sensor detection algorithms, but late fusion cannot fully exploit the complementary properties of sensors, thus having limited performance despite the huge potential of camera-radar fusion. Here we propose a novel proposal-level early fusion approach that effectively exploits both spatial and contextual properties of camera and radar for 3D object detection. Our fusion framework first associates image proposal with radar points in the polar coordinate system to efficiently handle the discrepancy between the coordinate system and spatial properties. Using this as a first stage, following consecutive cross-attention based feature fusion layers adaptively exchange spatio-contextual information between camera and radar, leading to a robust and attentive fusion. Our camera-radar fusion approach achieves the state-of-the-art 41.1% mAP and 52.3% NDS on the nuScenes test set, which is 8.7 and 10.8 points higher than the camera-only baseline, as well as yielding competitive performance on the LiDAR method.
ScaTE: A Scalable Framework for Self-Supervised Traversability Estimation in Unstructured Environments
Authors: Junwon Seo, Taekyung Kim, Kiho Kwak, Jihong Min, Inwook Shim
Date: 2022-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles

For the safe and successful navigation of autonomous vehicles in unstructured environments, the traversability of terrain should vary based on the driving capabilities of the vehicles. Actual driving experience can be utilized in a self-supervised fashion to learn vehicle-specific traversability. However, existing methods for learning self-supervised traversability are not highly scalable for learning the traversability of various vehicles. In this work, we introduce a scalable framework for learning self-supervised traversability, which can learn the traversability directly from vehicle-terrain interaction without any human supervision. We train a neural network that predicts the proprioceptive experience that a vehicle would undergo from 3D point clouds. Using a novel PU learning method, the network simultaneously identifies non-traversable regions where estimations can be overconfident. With driving data of various vehicles gathered from simulation and the real world, we show that our framework is capable of learning the self-supervised traversability of various vehicles. By integrating our framework with a model predictive controller, we demonstrate that estimated traversability results in effective navigation that enables distinct maneuvers based on the driving characteristics of the vehicles. In addition, experimental results validate the ability of our method to identify and avoid non-traversable regions.
iSimLoc: Visual Global Localization for Previously Unseen Environments with Simulated Images
Authors: Peng Yin, Ivan Cisneros, Ji Zhang, Howie Choset, Sebastian Scherer
Date: 2022-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Visual Localization

The visual camera is an attractive device in beyond visual line of sight (B-VLOS) drone operation, since they are low in size, weight, power, and cost, and can provide redundant modality to GPS failures. However, state-of-the-art visual localization algorithms are unable to match visual data that have a significantly different appearance due to illuminations or viewpoints. This paper presents iSimLoc, a condition/viewpoint consistent hierarchical global re-localization approach. The place features of iSimLoc can be utilized to search target images under changing appearances and viewpoints. Additionally, our hierarchical global re-localization module refines in a coarse-to-fine manner, allowing iSimLoc to perform a fast and accurate estimation. We evaluate our method on one dataset with appearance variations and one dataset that focuses on demonstrating large-scale matching over a long flight in complicated environments. On our two datasets, iSimLoc achieves 88.7\% and 83.8\% successful retrieval rates with 1.5s inferencing time, compared to 45.8% and 39.7% using the next best method. These results demonstrate robust localization in a range of environments.
Data-Driven Machine Learning Models for a Multi-Objective Flapping Fin Unmanned Underwater Vehicle Control System
Authors: Julian Lee, Kamal Viswanath, Jason Geder, Alisha Sharma, Marius Pruessner, Brian Zhou
Date: 2022-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Flapping-fin unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) propulsion systems provide high maneuverability for naval tasks such as surveillance and terrain exploration. Recent work has explored the use of time-series neural network surrogate models to predict thrust from vehicle design and fin kinematics. We develop a search-based inverse model that leverages a kinematics-to-thrust neural network model for control system design. Our inverse model finds a set of fin kinematics with the multi-objective goal of reaching a target thrust and creating a smooth kinematic transition between flapping cycles. We demonstrate how a control system integrating this inverse model can make online, cycle-to-cycle adjustments to prioritize different system objectives.
Active Perception Applied To Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Through Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Matheus G. Mateus, Ricardo B. Grando, Paulo L. J. Drews-Jr
Date: 2022-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have been standing out due to the wide range of applications in which they can be used autonomously. However, they need intelligent systems capable of providing a greater understanding of what they perceive to perform several tasks. They become more challenging in complex environments since there is a need to perceive the environment and act under environmental uncertainties to make a decision. In this context, a system that uses active perception can improve performance by seeking the best next view through the recognition of targets while displacement occurs. This work aims to contribute to the active perception of UAVs by tackling the problem of tracking and recognizing water surface structures to perform a dynamic landing. We show that our system with classical image processing techniques and a simple Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep-RL) agent is capable of perceiving the environment and dealing with uncertainties without making the use of complex Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) or Contrastive Learning (CL).
Mapless Navigation of a Hybrid Aerial Underwater Vehicle with Deep Reinforcement Learning Through Environmental Generalization
Authors: Ricardo B. Grando, Junior C. de Jesus, Victor A. Kich, Alisson H. Kolling, Rodrigo S. Guerra, Paulo L. J. Drews-Jr
Date: 2022-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning

Previous works showed that Deep-RL can be applied to perform mapless navigation, including the medium transition of Hybrid Unmanned Aerial Underwater Vehicles (HUAUVs). This paper presents new approaches based on the state-of-the-art actor-critic algorithms to address the navigation and medium transition problems for a HUAUV. We show that a double critic Deep-RL with Recurrent Neural Networks improves the navigation performance of HUAUVs using solely range data and relative localization. Our Deep-RL approaches achieved better navigation and transitioning capabilities with a solid generalization of learning through distinct simulated scenarios, outperforming previous approaches.
Deterministic and Stochastic Analysis of Deep Reinforcement Learning for Low Dimensional Sensing-based Navigation of Mobile Robots
Authors: Ricardo B. Grando, Junior C. de Jesus, Victor A. Kich, Alisson H. Kolling, Rodrigo S. Guerra, Paulo L. J. Drews-Jr
Date: 2022-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning

Deterministic and Stochastic techniques in Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep-RL) have become a promising solution to improve motion control and the decision-making tasks for a wide variety of robots. Previous works showed that these Deep-RL algorithms can be applied to perform mapless navigation of mobile robots in general. However, they tend to use simple sensing strategies since it has been shown that they perform poorly with a high dimensional state spaces, such as the ones yielded from image-based sensing. This paper presents a comparative analysis of two Deep-RL techniques - Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients (DDPG) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) - when performing tasks of mapless navigation for mobile robots. We aim to contribute by showing how the neural network architecture influences the learning itself, presenting quantitative results based on the time and distance of navigation of aerial mobile robots for each approach. Overall, our analysis of six distinct architectures highlights that the stochastic approach (SAC) better suits with deeper architectures, while the opposite happens with the deterministic approach (DDPG).