AMEND: A Mixture of Experts Framework for Long-tailed Trajectory Prediction

Accurate prediction of pedestrians' future motions is critical for intelligent driving systems. Developing models for this task requires rich datasets containing diverse sets of samples. However, the existing naturalistic trajectory prediction datasets are generally imbalanced in favor of simpler samples and lack challenging scenarios. Such a long-tail effect causes prediction models to underperform on the tail portion of the data distribution containing safety-critical scenarios. Previous methods tackle the long-tail problem using methods such as contrastive learning and class-conditioned hypernetworks. These approaches, however, are not modular and cannot be applied to many machine learning architectures. In this work, we propose a modular model-agnostic framework for trajectory prediction that leverages a specialized mixture of experts. In our approach, each expert is trained with a specialized skill with respect to a particular part of the data. To produce predictions, we utilise a router network that selects the best expert by generating relative confidence scores. We conduct experimentation on common pedestrian trajectory prediction datasets and show that besides achieving state-of-the-art performance, our method significantly performs better on long-tail scenarios. We further conduct ablation studies to highlight the contribution of different proposed components.

Sparsity aware coding for single photon sensitive vision using Selective Sensing

Optical coding has been widely adopted to improve the imaging techniques. Traditional coding strategies developed under additive Gaussian noise fail to perform optimally in the presence of Poisson noise. It has been observed in previous studies that coding performance varies significantly between these two noise models. In this work, we introduce a novel approach called selective sensing, which leverages training data to learn priors and optimizes the coding strategies for downstream classification tasks. By adapting to the specific characteristics of photon-counting sensors, the proposed method aims to improve coding performance under Poisson noise and enhance overall classification accuracy. Experimental and simulated results demonstrate the effectiveness of selective sensing in comparison to traditional coding strategies, highlighting its potential for practical applications in photon counting scenarios where Poisson noise are prevalent.