Localization matters too: How localization error affects UAV flight

The maximum safe flight speed of a Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is an important indicator for measuring its efficiency in completing various tasks. This indicator is influenced by numerous parameters such as UAV localization error, perception range, and system latency. However, in terms of localization errors, although there have been many studies dedicated to improving the localization capability of UAVs, there is a lack of quantitative research on their impact on speed. In this work, we model the relationship between various parameters of the UAV and its maximum flight speed. We consider a scenario similar to navigating through dense forests, where the UAV needs to quickly avoid obstacles directly ahead and swiftly reorient after avoidance. Based on this scenario, we studied how parameters such as localization error affect the maximum safe speed during UAV flight, as well as the coupling relationships between these parameters. Furthermore, we validated our model in a simulation environment, and the results showed that the predicted maximum safe speed had an error of less than 20% compared to the test speed. In high-density situations, localization error has a significant impact on the UAV's maximum safe flight speed. This model can help designers utilize more suitable software and hardware to construct a UAV system.

PixArt-$α$: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesis

The most advanced text-to-image (T2I) models require significant training costs (e.g., millions of GPU hours), seriously hindering the fundamental innovation for the AIGC community while increasing CO2 emissions. This paper introduces PIXART-$\alpha$, a Transformer-based T2I diffusion model whose image generation quality is competitive with state-of-the-art image generators (e.g., Imagen, SDXL, and even Midjourney), reaching near-commercial application standards. Additionally, it supports high-resolution image synthesis up to 1024px resolution with low training cost, as shown in Figure 1 and 2. To achieve this goal, three core designs are proposed: (1) Training strategy decomposition: We devise three distinct training steps that separately optimize pixel dependency, text-image alignment, and image aesthetic quality; (2) Efficient T2I Transformer: We incorporate cross-attention modules into Diffusion Transformer (DiT) to inject text conditions and streamline the computation-intensive class-condition branch; (3) High-informative data: We emphasize the significance of concept density in text-image pairs and leverage a large Vision-Language model to auto-label dense pseudo-captions to assist text-image alignment learning. As a result, PIXART-$\alpha$'s training speed markedly surpasses existing large-scale T2I models, e.g., PIXART-$\alpha$ only takes 10.8% of Stable Diffusion v1.5's training time (675 vs. 6,250 A100 GPU days), saving nearly \$300,000 (\$26,000 vs. \$320,000) and reducing 90% CO2 emissions. Moreover, compared with a larger SOTA model, RAPHAEL, our training cost is merely 1%. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PIXART-$\alpha$ excels in image quality, artistry, and semantic control. We hope PIXART-$\alpha$ will provide new insights to the AIGC community and startups to accelerate building their own high-quality yet low-cost generative models from scratch.

MetaMath: Bootstrap Your Own Mathematical Questions for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have pushed the limits of natural language understanding and exhibited excellent problem-solving ability. Despite the great success, most existing open-source LLMs (e.g., LLaMA-2) are still far away from satisfactory for solving mathematical problem due to the complex reasoning procedures. To bridge this gap, we propose MetaMath, a fine-tuned language model that specializes in mathematical reasoning. Specifically, we start by bootstrapping mathematical questions by rewriting the question from multiple perspectives without extra knowledge, which results in a new dataset called MetaMathQA. Then we fine-tune the LLaMA-2 models on MetaMathQA. Experimental results on two popular benchmarks (i.e., GSM8K and MATH) for mathematical reasoning demonstrate that MetaMath outperforms a suite of open-source LLMs by a significant margin. Our MetaMath-7B model achieves 66.4% on GSM8K and 19.4% on MATH, exceeding the state-of-the-art models of the same size by 11.5% and 8.7%. Particularly, MetaMath-70B achieves an accuracy of 82.3% on GSM8K, slightly better than GPT-3.5-Turbo. We release the MetaMathQA dataset, the MetaMath models with different model sizes and the training code for public use.

DiffFlow: A Unified SDE Framework for Score-Based Diffusion Models and Generative Adversarial Networks

Generative models can be categorized into two types: explicit generative models that define explicit density forms and allow exact likelihood inference, such as score-based diffusion models (SDMs) and normalizing flows; implicit generative models that directly learn a transformation from the prior to the data distribution, such as generative adversarial nets (GANs). While these two types of models have shown great success, they suffer from respective limitations that hinder them from achieving fast sampling and high sample quality simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a unified theoretic framework for SDMs and GANs. We shown that: i) the learning dynamics of both SDMs and GANs can be described as a novel SDE named Discriminator Denoising Diffusion Flow (DiffFlow) where the drift can be determined by some weighted combinations of scores of the real data and the generated data; ii) By adjusting the relative weights between different score terms, we can obtain a smooth transition between SDMs and GANs while the marginal distribution of the SDE remains invariant to the change of the weights; iii) we prove the asymptotic optimality and maximal likelihood training scheme of the DiffFlow dynamics; iv) under our unified theoretic framework, we introduce several instantiations of the DiffFLow that provide new algorithms beyond GANs and SDMs with exact likelihood inference and have potential to achieve flexible trade-off between high sample quality and fast sampling speed.

Point Cloud Change Detection With Stereo V-SLAM:Dataset, Metrics and Baseline

Localization and navigation are basic robotic tasks requiring an accurate and up-to-date map to finish these tasks, with crowdsourced data to detect map changes posing an appealing solution. Collecting and processing crowdsourced data requires low-cost sensors and algorithms, but existing methods rely on expensive sensors or computationally expensive algorithms. Additionally, there is no existing dataset to evaluate point cloud change detection. Thus, this paper proposes a novel framework using low-cost sensors like stereo cameras and IMU to detect changes in a point cloud map. Moreover, we create a dataset and the corresponding metrics to evaluate point cloud change detection with the help of the high-fidelity simulator Unreal Engine 4. Experiments show that our visualbased framework can effectively detect the changes in our dataset.

Explore-Bench: Data Sets, Metrics and Evaluations for Frontier-based and Deep-reinforcement-learning-based Autonomous Exploration

Autonomous exploration and mapping of unknown terrains employing single or multiple robots is an essential task in mobile robotics and has therefore been widely investigated. Nevertheless, given the lack of unified data sets, metrics, and platforms to evaluate the exploration approaches, we develop an autonomous robot exploration benchmark entitled Explore-Bench. The benchmark involves various exploration scenarios and presents two types of quantitative metrics to evaluate exploration efficiency and multi-robot cooperation. Explore-Bench is extremely useful as, recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been widely used for robot exploration tasks and achieved promising results. However, training DRL-based approaches requires large data sets, and additionally, current benchmarks rely on realistic simulators with a slow simulation speed, which is not appropriate for training exploration strategies. Hence, to support efficient DRL training and comprehensive evaluation, the suggested Explore-Bench designs a 3-level platform with a unified data flow and $12 \times$ speed-up that includes a grid-based simulator for fast evaluation and efficient training, a realistic Gazebo simulator, and a remotely accessible robot testbed for high-accuracy tests in physical environments. The practicality of the proposed benchmark is highlighted with the application of one DRL-based and three frontier-based exploration approaches. Furthermore, we analyze the performance differences and provide some insights about the selection and design of exploration methods. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/efc-robot/Explore-Bench.

Multi-UAV Coverage Planning with Limited Endurance in Disaster Environment

For scenes such as floods and earthquakes, the disaster area is large, and rescue time is tight. Multi-UAV exploration is more efficient than a single UAV. Existing UAV exploration work is modeled as a Coverage Path Planning (CPP) task to achieve full coverage of the area in the presence of obstacles. However, the endurance capability of UAV is limited, and the rescue time is urgent. Thus, even using multiple UAVs cannot achieve complete disaster area coverage in time. Therefore, in this paper we propose a multi-Agent Endurance-limited CPP (MAEl-CPP) problem based on a priori heatmap of the disaster area, which requires the exploration of more valuable areas under limited energy. Furthermore, we propose a path planning algorithm for the MAEl-CPP problem, by ranking the possible disaster areas according to their importance through satellite or remote aerial images and completing path planning according to the importance level. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm is at least twice as effective as the existing method in terms of search efficiency.

Attentional Separation-and-Aggregation Network for Self-supervised Depth-Pose Learning in Dynamic Scenes

Learning depth and ego-motion from unlabeled videos via self-supervision from epipolar projection can improve the robustness and accuracy of the 3D perception and localization of vision-based robots. However, the rigid projection computed by ego-motion cannot represent all scene points, such as points on moving objects, leading to false guidance in these regions. To address this problem, we propose an Attentional Separation-and-Aggregation Network (ASANet), which can learn to distinguish and extract the scene's static and dynamic characteristics via the attention mechanism. We further propose a novel MotionNet with an ASANet as the encoder, followed by two separate decoders, to estimate the camera's ego-motion and the scene's dynamic motion field. Then, we introduce an auto-selecting approach to detect the moving objects for dynamic-aware learning automatically. Empirical experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI benchmark.

Hu-Fu: Hardware and Software Collaborative Attack Framework against Neural Networks

Recently, Deep Learning (DL), especially Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), develops rapidly and is applied to many tasks, such as image classification, face recognition, image segmentation, and human detection. Due to its superior performance, DL-based models have a wide range of application in many areas, some of which are extremely safety-critical, e.g. intelligent surveillance and autonomous driving. Due to the latency and privacy problem of cloud computing, embedded accelerators are popular in these safety-critical areas. However, the robustness of the embedded DL system might be harmed by inserting hardware/software Trojans into the accelerator and the neural network model, since the accelerator and deploy tool (or neural network model) are usually provided by third-party companies. Fortunately, inserting hardware Trojans can only achieve inflexible attack, which means that hardware Trojans can easily break down the whole system or exchange two outputs, but can't make CNN recognize unknown pictures as targets. Though inserting software Trojans has more freedom of attack, it often requires tampering input images, which is not easy for attackers. So, in this paper, we propose a hardware-software collaborative attack framework to inject hidden neural network Trojans, which works as a back-door without requiring manipulating input images and is flexible for different scenarios. We test our attack framework for image classification and face recognition tasks, and get attack success rate of 92.6% and 100% on CIFAR10 and YouTube Faces, respectively, while keeping almost the same accuracy as the unattacked model in the normal mode. In addition, we show a specific attack scenario in which a face recognition system is attacked and gives a specific wrong answer.