ZoomTrack: Target-aware Non-uniform Resizing for Efficient Visual Tracking

Recently, the transformer has enabled the speed-oriented trackers to approach state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with high-speed thanks to the smaller input size or the lighter feature extraction backbone, though they still substantially lag behind their corresponding performance-oriented versions. In this paper, we demonstrate that it is possible to narrow or even close this gap while achieving high tracking speed based on the smaller input size. To this end, we non-uniformly resize the cropped image to have a smaller input size while the resolution of the area where the target is more likely to appear is higher and vice versa. This enables us to solve the dilemma of attending to a larger visual field while retaining more raw information for the target despite a smaller input size. Our formulation for the non-uniform resizing can be efficiently solved through quadratic programming (QP) and naturally integrated into most of the crop-based local trackers. Comprehensive experiments on five challenging datasets based on two kinds of transformer trackers, \ie, OSTrack and TransT, demonstrate consistent improvements over them. In particular, applying our method to the speed-oriented version of OSTrack even outperforms its performance-oriented counterpart by 0.6% AUC on TNL2K, while running 50% faster and saving over 55% MACs. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/Kou-99/ZoomTrack.

STORM: Efficient Stochastic Transformer based World Models for Reinforcement Learning

Recently, model-based reinforcement learning algorithms have demonstrated remarkable efficacy in visual input environments. These approaches begin by constructing a parameterized simulation world model of the real environment through self-supervised learning. By leveraging the imagination of the world model, the agent's policy is enhanced without the constraints of sampling from the real environment. The performance of these algorithms heavily relies on the sequence modeling and generation capabilities of the world model. However, constructing a perfectly accurate model of a complex unknown environment is nearly impossible. Discrepancies between the model and reality may cause the agent to pursue virtual goals, resulting in subpar performance in the real environment. Introducing random noise into model-based reinforcement learning has been proven beneficial. In this work, we introduce Stochastic Transformer-based wORld Model (STORM), an efficient world model architecture that combines the strong sequence modeling and generation capabilities of Transformers with the stochastic nature of variational autoencoders. STORM achieves a mean human performance of $126.7\%$ on the Atari $100$k benchmark, setting a new record among state-of-the-art methods that do not employ lookahead search techniques. Moreover, training an agent with $1.85$ hours of real-time interaction experience on a single NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card requires only $4.3$ hours, showcasing improved efficiency compared to previous methodologies.

Variational Bayesian Approximations Kalman Filter Based on Threshold Judgment

The estimation of non-Gaussian measurement noise models is a significant challenge across various fields. In practical applications, it often faces challenges due to the large number of parameters and high computational complexity. This paper proposes a threshold-based Kalman filtering approach for online estimation of noise parameters in non-Gaussian measurement noise models. This method uses a certain amount of sample data to infer the variance threshold of observation parameters and employs variational Bayesian estimation to obtain corresponding noise variance estimates, enabling subsequent iterations of the Kalman filtering algorithm. Finally, we evaluate the performance of this algorithm through simulation experiments, demonstrating its accurate and effective estimation of state and noise parameters.

A Covariance Adaptive Student's t Based Kalman Filter

In the classical Kalman filter(KF), the estimated state is a linear combination of the one-step predicted state and measurement state, their confidence level change when the prediction mean square error matrix and covariance matrix of measurement noise vary. The existing student's t based Kalman filter(TKF) works similarly to the way KF works, they both work well with impulse noise, but when it comes to Gaussian noise, TKF encounters an adjustment limit of the confidence level, this can lead to inaccuracies in such situations. This brief optimizes TKF by using the Gaussian mixture model(GMM), which generates a reasonable covariance matrix from the measurement noise to replace the one used in the existing algorithm and breaks the adjustment limit of the confidence level. At the end of the brief, the performance of the covariance adaptive student's t based Kalman filter(TGKF) is verified.

Quaternion MLP Neural Networks Based on the Maximum Correntropy Criterion

We propose a gradient ascent algorithm for quaternion multilayer perceptron (MLP) networks based on the cost function of the maximum correntropy criterion (MCC). In the algorithm, we use the split quaternion activation function based on the generalized Hamilton-real quaternion gradient. By introducing a new quaternion operator, we first rewrite the early quaternion single layer perceptron algorithm. Secondly, we propose a gradient descent algorithm for quaternion multilayer perceptron based on the cost function of the mean square error (MSE). Finally, the MSE algorithm is extended to the MCC algorithm. Simulations show the feasibility of the proposed method.

Unified Single-Stage Transformer Network for Efficient RGB-T Tracking

Most existing RGB-T tracking networks extract modality features in a separate manner, which lacks interaction and mutual guidance between modalities. This limits the network's ability to adapt to the diverse dual-modality appearances of targets and the dynamic relationships between the modalities. Additionally, the three-stage fusion tracking paradigm followed by these networks significantly restricts the tracking speed. To overcome these problems, we propose a unified single-stage Transformer RGB-T tracking network, namely USTrack, which unifies the above three stages into a single ViT (Vision Transformer) backbone with a dual embedding layer through self-attention mechanism. With this structure, the network can extract fusion features of the template and search region under the mutual interaction of modalities. Simultaneously, relation modeling is performed between these features, efficiently obtaining the search region fusion features with better target-background discriminability for prediction. Furthermore, we introduce a novel feature selection mechanism based on modality reliability to mitigate the influence of invalid modalities for prediction, further improving the tracking performance. Extensive experiments on three popular RGB-T tracking benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance while maintaining the fastest inference speed 84.2FPS. In particular, MPR/MSR on the short-term and long-term subsets of VTUAV dataset increased by 11.1$\%$/11.7$\%$ and 11.3$\%$/9.7$\%$.

Soft Decomposed Policy-Critic: Bridging the Gap for Effective Continuous Control with Discrete RL

Discrete reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated exceptional performance in solving sequential decision tasks with discrete action spaces, such as Atari games. However, their effectiveness is hindered when applied to continuous control problems due to the challenge of dimensional explosion. In this paper, we present the Soft Decomposed Policy-Critic (SDPC) architecture, which combines soft RL and actor-critic techniques with discrete RL methods to overcome this limitation. SDPC discretizes each action dimension independently and employs a shared critic network to maximize the soft $Q$-function. This novel approach enables SDPC to support two types of policies: decomposed actors that lead to the Soft Decomposed Actor-Critic (SDAC) algorithm, and decomposed $Q$-networks that generate Boltzmann soft exploration policies, resulting in the Soft Decomposed-Critic Q (SDCQ) algorithm. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art continuous RL algorithms in a variety of continuous control tasks, including Mujoco's Humanoid and Box2d's BipedalWalker. These empirical results validate the effectiveness of the SDPC architecture in addressing the challenges associated with continuous control.

Distributed fusion filter over lossy wireless sensor networks with the presence of non-Gaussian noise

The information transmission between nodes in a wireless sensor networks (WSNs) often causes packet loss due to denial-of-service (DoS) attack, energy limitations, and environmental factors, and the information that is successfully transmitted can also be contaminated by non-Gaussian noise. The presence of these two factors poses a challenge for distributed state estimation (DSE) over WSNs. In this paper, a generalized packet drop model is proposed to describe the packet loss phenomenon caused by DoS attacks and other factors. Moreover, a modified maximum correntropy Kalman filter is given, and it is extended to distributed form (DM-MCKF). In addition, a distributed modified maximum correntropy Kalman filter incorporating the generalized data packet drop (DM-MCKF-DPD) algorithm is provided to implement DSE with the presence of both non-Gaussian noise pollution and packet drop. A sufficient condition to ensure the convergence of the fixed-point iterative process of the DM-MCKF-DPD algorithm is presented and the computational complexity of the DM-MCKF-DPD algorithm is analyzed. Finally, the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed algorithms are verified by simulations.

Quantized generalized minimum error entropy for kernel recursive least squares adaptive filtering

The robustness of the kernel recursive least square (KRLS) algorithm has recently been improved by combining them with more robust information-theoretic learning criteria, such as minimum error entropy (MEE) and generalized MEE (GMEE), which also improves the computational complexity of the KRLS-type algorithms to a certain extent. To reduce the computational load of the KRLS-type algorithms, the quantized GMEE (QGMEE) criterion, in this paper, is combined with the KRLS algorithm, and as a result two kinds of KRLS-type algorithms, called quantized kernel recursive MEE (QKRMEE) and quantized kernel recursive GMEE (QKRGMEE), are designed. As well, the mean error behavior, mean square error behavior, and computational complexity of the proposed algorithms are investigated. In addition, simulation and real experimental data are utilized to verify the feasibility of the proposed algorithms.

Evidential Detection and Tracking Collaboration: New Problem, Benchmark and Algorithm for Robust Anti-UAV System

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in many areas, including transportation, surveillance, and military. However, their potential for safety and privacy violations is an increasing issue and highly limits their broader applications, underscoring the critical importance of UAV perception and defense (anti-UAV). Still, previous works have simplified such an anti-UAV task as a tracking problem, where the prior information of UAVs is always provided; such a scheme fails in real-world anti-UAV tasks (i.e. complex scenes, indeterminate-appear and -reappear UAVs, and real-time UAV surveillance). In this paper, we first formulate a new and practical anti-UAV problem featuring the UAVs perception in complex scenes without prior UAVs information. To benchmark such a challenging task, we propose the largest UAV dataset dubbed AntiUAV600 and a new evaluation metric. The AntiUAV600 comprises 600 video sequences of challenging scenes with random, fast, and small-scale UAVs, with over 723K thermal infrared frames densely annotated with bounding boxes. Finally, we develop a novel anti-UAV approach via an evidential collaboration of global UAVs detection and local UAVs tracking, which effectively tackles the proposed problem and can serve as a strong baseline for future research. Extensive experiments show our method outperforms SOTA approaches and validate the ability of AntiUAV600 to enhance UAV perception performance due to its large scale and complexity. Our dataset, pretrained models, and source codes will be released publically.