Do We Really Need a Learnable Classifier at the End of Deep Neural Network?

Modern deep neural networks for classification usually jointly learn a backbone for representation and a linear classifier to output the logit of each class. A recent study has shown a phenomenon called neural collapse that the within-class means of features and the classifier vectors converge to the vertices of a simplex equiangular tight frame (ETF) at the terminal phase of training on a balanced dataset. Since the ETF geometric structure maximally separates the pair-wise angles of all classes in the classifier, it is natural to raise the question, why do we spend an effort to learn a classifier when we know its optimal geometric structure? In this paper, we study the potential of learning a neural network for classification with the classifier randomly initialized as an ETF and fixed during training. Our analytical work based on the layer-peeled model indicates that the feature learning with a fixed ETF classifier naturally leads to the neural collapse state even when the dataset is imbalanced among classes. We further show that in this case the cross entropy (CE) loss is not necessary and can be replaced by a simple squared loss that shares the same global optimality but enjoys a more accurate gradient and better convergence property. Our experimental results show that our method is able to achieve similar performances on image classification for balanced datasets, and bring significant improvements in the long-tailed and fine-grained classification tasks.

Electric Vehicle Automatic Charging System Based on Vision-force Fusion

Electric vehicles are an emerging means of transportation with environmental friendliness. The automatic charging is a hot topic in this field that is full of challenges. We introduce a complete automatic charging system based on vision-force fusion, which includes perception, planning and control for robot manipulations of the system. We design the whole system in simulation and transfer it to the real world. The experimental results prove the effectiveness of our system.

X-view: Non-egocentric Multi-View 3D Object Detector

3D object detection algorithms for autonomous driving reason about 3D obstacles either from 3D birds-eye view or perspective view or both. Recent works attempt to improve the detection performance via mining and fusing from multiple egocentric views. Although the egocentric perspective view alleviates some weaknesses of the birds-eye view, the sectored grid partition becomes so coarse in the distance that the targets and surrounding context mix together, which makes the features less discriminative. In this paper, we generalize the research on 3D multi-view learning and propose a novel multi-view-based 3D detection method, named X-view, to overcome the drawbacks of the multi-view methods. Specifically, X-view breaks through the traditional limitation about the perspective view whose original point must be consistent with the 3D Cartesian coordinate. X-view is designed as a general paradigm that can be applied on almost any 3D detectors based on LiDAR with only little increment of running time, no matter it is voxel/grid-based or raw-point-based. We conduct experiments on KITTI and NuScenes datasets to demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of our proposed X-view. The results show that X-view obtains consistent improvements when combined with four mainstream state-of-the-art 3D methods: SECOND, PointRCNN, Part-A^2, and PV-RCNN.

Stable Learning via Causality-based Feature Rectification

How to learn a stable model under agnostic distribution shift between training and testing datasets is an essential problem in machine learning tasks. The agnostic distribution shift caused by data generation bias can lead to model misspecification and unstable performance across different test datasets. Most of the recently proposed methods are causality-based sample reweighting methods, whose performance is affected by sample size. Moreover, these works are restricted to linear models, not to deep-learning based nonlinear models. In this work, we propose a novel Causality-based Feature Rectification (CFR) method to address the model misspecification problem under agnostic distribution shift by using a weight matrix to rectify features. Our proposal based on the fact that the causality between stable features and the ground truth is consistent under agnostic distribution shift, but is partly omitted and statistically correlated with other features. We propose the feature rectification weight matrix to reconstruct the omitted causality by using other features as proxy variables. We further propose an algorithm that jointly optimizes the weight matrix and the regressor (or classifier). Our proposal can not only improve the stability of linear models, but also deep-learning based models. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposal outperforms previous state-of-the-art stable learning methods. The code will be released later on.

Boundary-Aware Dense Feature Indicator for Single-Stage 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds

3D object detection based on point clouds has become more and more popular. Some methods propose localizing 3D objects directly from raw point clouds to avoid information loss. However, these methods come with complex structures and significant computational overhead, limiting its broader application in real-time scenarios. Some methods choose to transform the point cloud data into compact tensors first and leverage off-the-shelf 2D detectors to propose 3D objects, which is much faster and achieves state-of-the-art results. However, because of the inconsistency between 2D and 3D data, we argue that the performance of compact tensor-based 3D detectors is restricted if we use 2D detectors without corresponding modification. Specifically, the distribution of point clouds is uneven, with most points gather on the boundary of objects, while detectors for 2D data always extract features evenly. Motivated by this observation, we propose DENse Feature Indicator (DENFI), a universal module that helps 3D detectors focus on the densest region of the point clouds in a boundary-aware manner. Moreover, DENFI is lightweight and guarantees real-time speed when applied to 3D object detectors. Experiments on KITTI dataset show that DENFI improves the performance of the baseline single-stage detector remarkably, which achieves new state-of-the-art performance among previous 3D detectors, including both two-stage and multi-sensor fusion methods, in terms of mAP with a 34FPS detection speed.

SQLFlow: A Bridge between SQL and Machine Learning

Industrial AI systems are mostly end-to-end machine learning (ML) workflows. A typical recommendation or business intelligence system includes many online micro-services and offline jobs. We describe SQLFlow for developing such workflows efficiently in SQL. SQL enables developers to write short programs focusing on the purpose (what) and ignoring the procedure (how). Previous database systems extended their SQL dialect to support ML. SQLFlow (https://sqlflow.org/sqlflow ) takes another strategy to work as a bridge over various database systems, including MySQL, Apache Hive, and Alibaba MaxCompute, and ML engines like TensorFlow, XGBoost, and scikit-learn. We extended SQL syntax carefully to make the extension working with various SQL dialects. We implement the extension by inventing a collaborative parsing algorithm. SQLFlow is efficient and expressive to a wide variety of ML techniques -- supervised and unsupervised learning; deep networks and tree models; visual model explanation in addition to training and prediction; data processing and feature extraction in addition to ML. SQLFlow compiles a SQL program into a Kubernetes-native workflow for fault-tolerable execution and on-cloud deployment. Current industrial users include Ant Financial, DiDi, and Alibaba Group.

PI-RCNN: An Efficient Multi-sensor 3D Object Detector with Point-based Attentive Cont-conv Fusion Module

LIDAR point clouds and RGB-images are both extremely essential for 3D object detection. So many state-of-the-art 3D detection algorithms dedicate in fusing these two types of data effectively. However, their fusion methods based on Birds Eye View (BEV) or voxel format are not accurate. In this paper, we propose a novel fusion approach named Point-based Attentive Cont-conv Fusion(PACF) module, which fuses multi-sensor features directly on 3D points. Except for continuous convolution, we additionally add a Point-Pooling and an Attentive Aggregation to make the fused features more expressive. Moreover, based on the PACF module, we propose a 3D multi-sensor multi-task network called Pointcloud-Image RCNN(PI-RCNN as brief), which handles the image segmentation and 3D object detection tasks. PI-RCNN employs a segmentation sub-network to extract full-resolution semantic feature maps from images and then fuses the multi-sensor features via powerful PACF module. Beneficial from the effectiveness of the PACF module and the expressive semantic features from the segmentation module, PI-RCNN can improve much in 3D object detection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the PACF module and PI-RCNN on the KITTI 3D Detection benchmark, and our method can achieve state-of-the-art on the metric of 3D AP.