pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning Environment-Aware Affordance for 3D Articulated Object Manipulation under Occlusions
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Object

Perceiving and manipulating 3D articulated objects in diverse environments is essential for home-assistant robots. Recent studies have shown that point-level affordance provides actionable priors for downstream manipulation tasks. However, existing works primarily focus on single-object scenarios with homogeneous agents, overlooking the realistic constraints imposed by the environment and the agent's morphology, e.g., occlusions and physical limitations. In this paper, we propose an environment-aware affordance framework that incorporates both object-level actionable priors and environment constraints. Unlike object-centric affordance approaches, learning environment-aware affordance faces the challenge of combinatorial explosion due to the complexity of various occlusions, characterized by their quantities, geometries, positions and poses. To address this and enhance data efficiency, we introduce a novel contrastive affordance learning framework capable of training on scenes containing a single occluder and generalizing to scenes with complex occluder combinations. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in learning affordance considering environment constraints. Project page at https://chengkaiacademycity.github.io/EnvAwareAfford/
Connected Autonomous Vehicle Motion Planning with Video Predictions from Smart, Self-Supervised Infrastructure
Authors: Jiankai Sun, Shreyas Kousik, David Fridovich-Keil, Mac Schwager
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Motion Planning

Connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) promise to enhance safety, efficiency, and sustainability in urban transportation. However, this is contingent upon a CAV correctly predicting the motion of surrounding agents and planning its own motion safely. Doing so is challenging in complex urban environments due to frequent occlusions and interactions among many agents. One solution is to leverage smart infrastructure to augment a CAV's situational awareness; the present work leverages a recently proposed "Self-Supervised Traffic Advisor" (SSTA) framework of smart sensors that teach themselves to generate and broadcast useful video predictions of road users. In this work, SSTA predictions are modified to predict future occupancy instead of raw video, which reduces the data footprint of broadcast predictions. The resulting predictions are used within a planning framework, demonstrating that this design can effectively aid CAV motion planning. A variety of numerical experiments study the key factors that make SSTA outputs useful for practical CAV planning in crowded urban environments.
HDTR-Net: A Real-Time High-Definition Teeth Restoration Network for Arbitrary Talking Face Generation Methods
Authors: Yongyuan Li, Xiuyuan Qin, Chao Liang, Mingqiang Wei
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Generation, Super-Resolution, Talking Face Generation

Talking Face Generation (TFG) aims to reconstruct facial movements to achieve high natural lip movements from audio and facial features that are under potential connections. Existing TFG methods have made significant advancements to produce natural and realistic images. However, most work rarely takes visual quality into consideration. It is challenging to ensure lip synchronization while avoiding visual quality degradation in cross-modal generation methods. To address this issue, we propose a universal High-Definition Teeth Restoration Network, dubbed HDTR-Net, for arbitrary TFG methods. HDTR-Net can enhance teeth regions at an extremely fast speed while maintaining synchronization, and temporal consistency. In particular, we propose a Fine-Grained Feature Fusion (FGFF) module to effectively capture fine texture feature information around teeth and surrounding regions, and use these features to fine-grain the feature map to enhance the clarity of teeth. Extensive experiments show that our method can be adapted to arbitrary TFG methods without suffering from lip synchronization and frame coherence. Another advantage of HDTR-Net is its real-time generation ability. Also under the condition of high-definition restoration of talking face video synthesis, its inference speed is $300\%$ faster than the current state-of-the-art face restoration based on super-resolution.
Where2Explore: Few-shot Affordance Learning for Unseen Novel Categories of Articulated Objects
Authors: Chuanruo Ning, Ruihai Wu, Haoran Lu, Kaichun Mo, Hao Dong
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Efficient Exploration, Few-Shot Learning

Articulated object manipulation is a fundamental yet challenging task in robotics. Due to significant geometric and semantic variations across object categories, previous manipulation models struggle to generalize to novel categories. Few-shot learning is a promising solution for alleviating this issue by allowing robots to perform a few interactions with unseen objects. However, extant approaches often necessitate costly and inefficient test-time interactions with each unseen instance. Recognizing this limitation, we observe that despite their distinct shapes, different categories often share similar local geometries essential for manipulation, such as pullable handles and graspable edges - a factor typically underutilized in previous few-shot learning works. To harness this commonality, we introduce 'Where2Explore', an affordance learning framework that effectively explores novel categories with minimal interactions on a limited number of instances. Our framework explicitly estimates the geometric similarity across different categories, identifying local areas that differ from shapes in the training categories for efficient exploration while concurrently transferring affordance knowledge to similar parts of the objects. Extensive experiments in simulated and real-world environments demonstrate our framework's capacity for efficient few-shot exploration and generalization.
Detecting Unknown Attacks in IoT Environments: An Open Set Classifier for Enhanced Network Intrusion Detection
Authors: Yasir Ali Farrukh, Syed Wali, Irfan Khan, Nathaniel D. Bastian
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Intrusion Detection, Network Intrusion Detection, Open Set Learning

The widespread integration of Internet of Things (IoT) devices across all facets of life has ushered in an era of interconnectedness, creating new avenues for cybersecurity challenges and underscoring the need for robust intrusion detection systems. However, traditional security systems are designed with a closed-world perspective and often face challenges in dealing with the ever-evolving threat landscape, where new and unfamiliar attacks are constantly emerging. In this paper, we introduce a framework aimed at mitigating the open set recognition (OSR) problem in the realm of Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) tailored for IoT environments. Our framework capitalizes on image-based representations of packet-level data, extracting spatial and temporal patterns from network traffic. Additionally, we integrate stacking and sub-clustering techniques, enabling the identification of unknown attacks by effectively modeling the complex and diverse nature of benign behavior. The empirical results prominently underscore the framework's efficacy, boasting an impressive 88\% detection rate for previously unseen attacks when compared against existing approaches and recent advancements. Future work will perform extensive experimentation across various openness levels and attack scenarios, further strengthening the adaptability and performance of our proposed solution in safeguarding IoT environments.
Towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in the Internet of Things (IoT): Opportunities and Challenges
Authors: Fei Dou, Jin Ye, Geng Yuan, Qin Lu, Wei Niu, Haijian Sun, Le Guan, Guoyu Lu, Gengchen Mai, Ninghao Liu, Jin Lu, Zhengliang Liu, Zihao Wu, Chenjiao Tan, Shaochen Xu, Xianqiao Wang, Guoming Li, Lilong Chai, Sheng Li, Jin Sun, Hongyue Sun, Yunli Shao, Changying Li, Tianming Liu, WenZhan Song
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), possessing the capacity to comprehend, learn, and execute tasks with human cognitive abilities, engenders significant anticipation and intrigue across scientific, commercial, and societal arenas. This fascination extends particularly to the Internet of Things (IoT), a landscape characterized by the interconnection of countless devices, sensors, and systems, collectively gathering and sharing data to enable intelligent decision-making and automation. This research embarks on an exploration of the opportunities and challenges towards achieving AGI in the context of the IoT. Specifically, it starts by outlining the fundamental principles of IoT and the critical role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in IoT systems. Subsequently, it delves into AGI fundamentals, culminating in the formulation of a conceptual framework for AGI's seamless integration within IoT. The application spectrum for AGI-infused IoT is broad, encompassing domains ranging from smart grids, residential environments, manufacturing, and transportation to environmental monitoring, agriculture, healthcare, and education. However, adapting AGI to resource-constrained IoT settings necessitates dedicated research efforts. Furthermore, the paper addresses constraints imposed by limited computing resources, intricacies associated with large-scale IoT communication, as well as the critical concerns pertaining to security and privacy.
Semantic Parsing in Limited Resource Conditions
Authors: Zhuang Li
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Continual Learning, Machine Translation, Semantic Parsing, Transfer Learning, Translation

This thesis explores challenges in semantic parsing, specifically focusing on scenarios with limited data and computational resources. It offers solutions using techniques like automatic data curation, knowledge transfer, active learning, and continual learning. For tasks with no parallel training data, the thesis proposes generating synthetic training examples from structured database schemas. When there is abundant data in a source domain but limited parallel data in a target domain, knowledge from the source is leveraged to improve parsing in the target domain. For multilingual situations with limited data in the target languages, the thesis introduces a method to adapt parsers using a limited human translation budget. Active learning is applied to select source-language samples for manual translation, maximizing parser performance in the target language. In addition, an alternative method is also proposed to utilize machine translation services, supplemented by human-translated data, to train a more effective parser. When computational resources are limited, a continual learning approach is introduced to minimize training time and computational memory. This maintains the parser's efficiency in previously learned tasks while adapting it to new tasks, mitigating the problem of catastrophic forgetting. Overall, the thesis provides a comprehensive set of methods to improve semantic parsing in resource-constrained conditions.
JSMNet Improving Indoor Point Cloud Semantic and Instance Segmentation through Self-Attention and Multiscale
Authors: Shuochen Xu, Zhenxin Zhang
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The semantic understanding of indoor 3D point cloud data is crucial for a range of subsequent applications, including indoor service robots, navigation systems, and digital twin engineering. Global features are crucial for achieving high-quality semantic and instance segmentation of indoor point clouds, as they provide essential long-range context information. To this end, we propose JSMNet, which combines a multi-layer network with a global feature self-attention module to jointly segment three-dimensional point cloud semantics and instances. To better express the characteristics of indoor targets, we have designed a multi-resolution feature adaptive fusion module that takes into account the differences in point cloud density caused by varying scanner distances from the target. Additionally, we propose a framework for joint semantic and instance segmentation by integrating semantic and instance features to achieve superior results. We conduct experiments on S3DIS, which is a large three-dimensional indoor point cloud dataset. Our proposed method is compared against other methods, and the results show that it outperforms existing methods in semantic and instance segmentation and provides better results in target local area segmentation. Specifically, our proposed method outperforms PointNet (Qi et al., 2017a) by 16.0% and 26.3% in terms of semantic segmentation mIoU in S3DIS (Area 5) and instance segmentation mPre, respectively. Additionally, it surpasses ASIS (Wang et al., 2019) by 6.0% and 4.6%, respectively, as well as JSPNet (Chen et al., 2022) by a margin of 3.3% for semantic segmentation mIoU and a slight improvement of 0.3% for instance segmentation mPre.
Client-side Gradient Inversion Against Federated Learning from Poisoning
Authors: Jiaheng Wei, Yanjun Zhang, Leo Yu Zhang, Chao Chen, Shirui Pan, Kok-Leong Ong, Jun Zhang, Yang Xiang
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) enables distributed participants (e.g., mobile devices) to train a global model without sharing data directly to a central server. Recent studies have revealed that FL is vulnerable to gradient inversion attack (GIA), which aims to reconstruct the original training samples and poses high risk against the privacy of clients in FL. However, most existing GIAs necessitate control over the server and rely on strong prior knowledge including batch normalization and data distribution information. In this work, we propose Client-side poisoning Gradient Inversion (CGI), which is a novel attack method that can be launched from clients. For the first time, we show the feasibility of a client-side adversary with limited knowledge being able to recover the training samples from the aggregated global model. We take a distinct approach in which the adversary utilizes a malicious model that amplifies the loss of a specific targeted class of interest. When honest clients employ the poisoned global model, the gradients of samples belonging to the targeted class are magnified, making them the dominant factor in the aggregated update. This enables the adversary to effectively reconstruct the private input belonging to other clients using the aggregated update. In addition, our CGI also features its ability to remain stealthy against Byzantine-robust aggregation rules (AGRs). By optimizing malicious updates and blending benign updates with a malicious replacement vector, our method remains undetected by these defense mechanisms. To evaluate the performance of CGI, we conduct experiments on various benchmark datasets, considering representative Byzantine-robust AGRs, and exploring diverse FL settings with different levels of adversary knowledge about the data. Our results demonstrate that CGI consistently and successfully extracts training input in all tested scenarios.
FunCodec: A Fundamental, Reproducible and Integrable Open-source Toolkit for Neural Speech Codec
Authors: Zhihao Du, Shiliang Zhang, Kai Hu, Siqi Zheng
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-To-Speech Synthesis

This paper presents FunCodec, a fundamental neural speech codec toolkit, which is an extension of the open-source speech processing toolkit FunASR. FunCodec provides reproducible training recipes and inference scripts for the latest neural speech codec models, such as SoundStream and Encodec. Thanks to the unified design with FunASR, FunCodec can be easily integrated into downstream tasks, such as speech recognition. Along with FunCodec, pre-trained models are also provided, which can be used for academic or generalized purposes. Based on the toolkit, we further propose the frequency-domain codec models, FreqCodec, which can achieve comparable speech quality with much lower computation and parameter complexity. Experimental results show that, under the same compression ratio, FunCodec can achieve better reconstruction quality compared with other toolkits and released models. We also demonstrate that the pre-trained models are suitable for downstream tasks, including automatic speech recognition and personalized text-to-speech synthesis. This toolkit is publicly available at https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/FunCodec.
Multi-Grade Deep Learning for Partial Differential Equations with Applications to the Burgers Equation
Authors: Yuesheng Xu, Taishan Zeng
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

We develop in this paper a multi-grade deep learning method for solving nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs). Deep neural networks (DNNs) have received super performance in solving PDEs in addition to their outstanding success in areas such as natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics. However, training a very deep network is often a challenging task. As the number of layers of a DNN increases, solving a large-scale non-convex optimization problem that results in the DNN solution of PDEs becomes more and more difficult, which may lead to a decrease rather than an increase in predictive accuracy. To overcome this challenge, we propose a two-stage multi-grade deep learning (TS-MGDL) method that breaks down the task of learning a DNN into several neural networks stacked on top of each other in a staircase-like manner. This approach allows us to mitigate the complexity of solving the non-convex optimization problem with large number of parameters and learn residual components left over from previous grades efficiently. We prove that each grade/stage of the proposed TS-MGDL method can reduce the value of the loss function and further validate this fact through numerical experiments. Although the proposed method is applicable to general PDEs, implementation in this paper focuses only on the 1D, 2D, and 3D viscous Burgers equations. Experimental results show that the proposed two-stage multi-grade deep learning method enables efficient learning of solutions of the equations and outperforms existing single-grade deep learning methods in predictive accuracy. Specifically, the predictive errors of the single-grade deep learning are larger than those of the TS-MGDL method in 26-60, 4-31 and 3-12 times, for the 1D, 2D, and 3D equations, respectively.
Semantic Adversarial Attacks via Diffusion Models
Authors: Chenan Wang, Jinhao Duan, Chaowei Xiao, Edward Kim, Matthew Stamm, Kaidi Xu
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

Traditional adversarial attacks concentrate on manipulating clean examples in the pixel space by adding adversarial perturbations. By contrast, semantic adversarial attacks focus on changing semantic attributes of clean examples, such as color, context, and features, which are more feasible in the real world. In this paper, we propose a framework to quickly generate a semantic adversarial attack by leveraging recent diffusion models since semantic information is included in the latent space of well-trained diffusion models. Then there are two variants of this framework: 1) the Semantic Transformation (ST) approach fine-tunes the latent space of the generated image and/or the diffusion model itself; 2) the Latent Masking (LM) approach masks the latent space with another target image and local backpropagation-based interpretation methods. Additionally, the ST approach can be applied in either white-box or black-box settings. Extensive experiments are conducted on CelebA-HQ and AFHQ datasets, and our framework demonstrates great fidelity, generalizability, and transferability compared to other baselines. Our approaches achieve approximately 100% attack success rate in multiple settings with the best FID as 36.61. Code is available at https://github.com/steven202/semantic_adv_via_dm.
DebCSE: Rethinking Unsupervised Contrastive Sentence Embedding Learning in the Debiasing Perspective
Authors: Pu Miao, Zeyao Du, Junlin Zhang
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Sentence, Sentence Embedding, Sentence-Embedding, Sentence Embeddings, STS

Several prior studies have suggested that word frequency biases can cause the Bert model to learn indistinguishable sentence embeddings. Contrastive learning schemes such as SimCSE and ConSERT have already been adopted successfully in unsupervised sentence embedding to improve the quality of embeddings by reducing this bias. However, these methods still introduce new biases such as sentence length bias and false negative sample bias, that hinders model's ability to learn more fine-grained semantics. In this paper, we reexamine the challenges of contrastive sentence embedding learning from a debiasing perspective and argue that effectively eliminating the influence of various biases is crucial for learning high-quality sentence embeddings. We think all those biases are introduced by simple rules for constructing training data in contrastive learning and the key for contrastive learning sentence embedding is to mimic the distribution of training data in supervised machine learning in unsupervised way. We propose a novel contrastive framework for sentence embedding, termed DebCSE, which can eliminate the impact of these biases by an inverse propensity weighted sampling method to select high-quality positive and negative pairs according to both the surface and semantic similarity between sentences. Extensive experiments on semantic textual similarity (STS) benchmarks reveal that DebCSE significantly outperforms the latest state-of-the-art models with an average Spearman's correlation coefficient of 80.33% on BERTbase.
Unleashing the Power of Depth and Pose Estimation Neural Networks by Designing Compatible Endoscopic Images
Authors: Junyang Wu, Yun Gu
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Pose Estimation

Deep learning models have witnessed depth and pose estimation framework on unannotated datasets as a effective pathway to succeed in endoscopic navigation. Most current techniques are dedicated to developing more advanced neural networks to improve the accuracy. However, existing methods ignore the special properties of endoscopic images, resulting in an inability to fully unleash the power of neural networks. In this study, we conduct a detail analysis of the properties of endoscopic images and improve the compatibility of images and neural networks, to unleash the power of current neural networks. First, we introcude the Mask Image Modelling (MIM) module, which inputs partial image information instead of complete image information, allowing the network to recover global information from partial pixel information. This enhances the network' s ability to perceive global information and alleviates the phenomenon of local overfitting in convolutional neural networks due to local artifacts. Second, we propose a lightweight neural network to enhance the endoscopic images, to explicitly improve the compatibility between images and neural networks. Extensive experiments are conducted on the three public datasets and one inhouse dataset, and the proposed modules improve baselines by a large margin. Furthermore, the enhanced images we proposed, which have higher network compatibility, can serve as an effective data augmentation method and they are able to extract more stable feature points in traditional feature point matching tasks and achieve outstanding performance.