Exploring Color Invariance through Image-Level Ensemble Learning

In the field of computer vision, the persistent presence of color bias, resulting from fluctuations in real-world lighting and camera conditions, presents a substantial challenge to the robustness of models. This issue is particularly pronounced in complex wide-area surveillance scenarios, such as person re-identification and industrial dust segmentation, where models often experience a decline in performance due to overfitting on color information during training, given the presence of environmental variations. Consequently, there is a need to effectively adapt models to cope with the complexities of camera conditions. To address this challenge, this study introduces a learning strategy named Random Color Erasing, which draws inspiration from ensemble learning. This strategy selectively erases partial or complete color information in the training data without disrupting the original image structure, thereby achieving a balanced weighting of color features and other features within the neural network. This approach mitigates the risk of overfitting and enhances the model's ability to handle color variation, thereby improving its overall robustness. The approach we propose serves as an ensemble learning strategy, characterized by robust interpretability. A comprehensive analysis of this methodology is presented in this paper. Across various tasks such as person re-identification and semantic segmentation, our approach consistently improves strong baseline methods. Notably, in comparison to existing methods that prioritize color robustness, our strategy significantly enhances performance in cross-domain scenarios. The code available at \url{https://github.com/layumi/Person\_reID\_baseline\_pytorch/blob/master/random\_erasing.py} or \url{https://github.com/finger-monkey/Data-Augmentation}.

Cross-Modality Perturbation Synergy Attack for Person Re-identification

In recent years, there has been significant research focusing on addressing security concerns in single-modal person re-identification (ReID) systems that are based on RGB images. However, the safety of cross-modality scenarios, which are more commonly encountered in practical applications involving images captured by infrared cameras, has not received adequate attention. The main challenge in cross-modality ReID lies in effectively dealing with visual differences between different modalities. For instance, infrared images are typically grayscale, unlike visible images that contain color information. Existing attack methods have primarily focused on the characteristics of the visible image modality, overlooking the features of other modalities and the variations in data distribution among different modalities. This oversight can potentially undermine the effectiveness of these methods in image retrieval across diverse modalities. This study represents the first exploration into the security of cross-modality ReID models and proposes a universal perturbation attack specifically designed for cross-modality ReID. This attack optimizes perturbations by leveraging gradients from diverse modality data, thereby disrupting the discriminator and reinforcing the differences between modalities. We conducted experiments on two widely used cross-modality datasets, namely RegDB and SYSU, which not only demonstrated the effectiveness of our method but also provided insights for future enhancements in the robustness of cross-modality ReID systems.

Pre-Evolved Model for Complex Multi-objective Optimization Problems

Multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs) necessitate the simultaneous optimization of multiple objectives. Numerous studies have demonstrated that evolutionary computation is a promising paradigm for solving complex MOPs, which involve optimization problems with large-scale decision variables, many objectives, and expensive evaluation functions. However, existing multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) encounter significant challenges in generating high-quality populations when solving diverse complex MOPs. Specifically, the distinct requirements and constraints of the population result in the inefficiency or even incompetence of MOEAs in addressing various complex MOPs. Therefore, this paper proposes the concept of pre-evolving for MOEAs to generate high-quality populations for diverse complex MOPs. Drawing inspiration from the classical transformer architecture, we devise dimension embedding and objective encoding techniques to configure the pre-evolved model (PEM). The PEM is pre-evolved on a substantial number of existing MOPs. Subsequently, when fine-evolving on new complex MOPs, the PEM transforms the population into the next generation to approximate the Pareto-optimal front. Furthermore, it utilizes evaluations on new solutions to iteratively update the PEM for subsequent generations, thereby efficiently solving various complex MOPs. Experimental results demonstrate that the PEM outperforms state-of-the-art MOEAs on a range of complex MOPs.

Improving Performance Insensitivity of Large-scale Multiobjective Optimization via Monte Carlo Tree Search

The large-scale multiobjective optimization problem (LSMOP) is characterized by simultaneously optimizing multiple conflicting objectives and involving hundreds of decision variables. Many real-world applications in engineering fields can be modeled as LSMOPs; simultaneously, engineering applications require insensitivity in performance. This requirement usually means that the results from the algorithm runs should not only be good for every run in terms of performance but also that the performance of multiple runs should not fluctuate too much, i.e., the algorithm shows good insensitivity. Considering that substantial computational resources are requested for each run, it is essential to improve upon the performance of the large-scale multiobjective optimization algorithm, as well as the insensitivity of the algorithm. However, existing large-scale multiobjective optimization algorithms solely focus on improving the performance of the algorithms, leaving the insensitivity characteristics unattended. In this work, we propose an evolutionary algorithm for solving LSMOPs based on Monte Carlo tree search, the so-called LMMOCTS, which aims to improve the performance and insensitivity for large-scale multiobjective optimization problems. The proposed method samples the decision variables to construct new nodes on the Monte Carlo tree for optimization and evaluation. It selects nodes with good evaluation for further search to reduce the performance sensitivity caused by large-scale decision variables. We compare the proposed algorithm with several state-of-the-art designs on different benchmark functions. We also propose two metrics to measure the sensitivity of the algorithm. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness and performance insensitivity of the proposed design for solving large-scale multiobjective optimization problems.

A Recommender System Approach for Very Large-scale Multiobjective Optimization

We define very large multi-objective optimization problems to be multiobjective optimization problems in which the number of decision variables is greater than 100,000 dimensions. This is an important class of problems as many real-world problems require optimizing hundreds of thousands of variables. Existing evolutionary optimization methods fall short of such requirements when dealing with problems at this very large scale. Inspired by the success of existing recommender systems to handle very large-scale items with limited historical interactions, in this paper we propose a method termed Very large-scale Multiobjective Optimization through Recommender Systems (VMORS). The idea of the proposed method is to transform the defined such very large-scale problems into a problem that can be tackled by a recommender system. In the framework, the solutions are regarded as users, and the different evolution directions are items waiting for the recommendation. We use Thompson sampling to recommend the most suitable items (evolutionary directions) for different users (solutions), in order to locate the optimal solution to a multiobjective optimization problem in a very large search space within acceptable time. We test our proposed method on different problems from 100,000 to 500,000 dimensions, and experimental results show that our method not only shows good performance but also significant improvement over existing methods.

An Evolutionary Multitasking Algorithm with Multiple Filtering for High-Dimensional Feature Selection

Recently, evolutionary multitasking (EMT) has been successfully used in the field of high-dimensional classification. However, the generation of multiple tasks in the existing EMT-based feature selection (FS) methods is relatively simple, using only the Relief-F method to collect related features with similar importance into one task, which cannot provide more diversified tasks for knowledge transfer. Thus, this paper devises a new EMT algorithm for FS in high-dimensional classification, which first adopts different filtering methods to produce multiple tasks and then modifies a competitive swarm optimizer to efficiently solve these related tasks via knowledge transfer. First, a diversified multiple task generation method is designed based on multiple filtering methods, which generates several relevant low-dimensional FS tasks by eliminating irrelevant features. In this way, useful knowledge for solving simple and relevant tasks can be transferred to simplify and speed up the solution of the original high-dimensional FS task. Then, a competitive swarm optimizer is modified to simultaneously solve these relevant FS tasks by transferring useful knowledge among them. Numerous empirical results demonstrate that the proposed EMT-based FS method can obtain a better feature subset than several state-of-the-art FS methods on eighteen high-dimensional datasets.

Balancing Exploration and Exploitation for Solving Large-scale Multiobjective Optimization via Attention Mechanism

Large-scale multiobjective optimization problems (LSMOPs) refer to optimization problems with multiple conflicting optimization objectives and hundreds or even thousands of decision variables. A key point in solving LSMOPs is how to balance exploration and exploitation so that the algorithm can search in a huge decision space efficiently. Large-scale multiobjective evolutionary algorithms consider the balance between exploration and exploitation from the individual's perspective. However, these algorithms ignore the significance of tackling this issue from the perspective of decision variables, which makes the algorithm lack the ability to search from different dimensions and limits the performance of the algorithm. In this paper, we propose a large-scale multiobjective optimization algorithm based on the attention mechanism, called (LMOAM). The attention mechanism will assign a unique weight to each decision variable, and LMOAM will use this weight to strike a balance between exploration and exploitation from the decision variable level. Nine different sets of LSMOP benchmarks are conducted to verify the algorithm proposed in this paper, and the experimental results validate the effectiveness of our design.

A Cooperation-Aware Lane Change Method for Autonomous Vehicles

Lane change for autonomous vehicles (AVs) is an important but challenging task in complex dynamic traffic environments. Due to difficulties in guarantee safety as well as a high efficiency, AVs are inclined to choose relatively conservative strategies for lane change. To avoid the conservatism, this paper presents a cooperation-aware lane change method utilizing interactions between vehicles. We first propose an interactive trajectory prediction method to explore possible cooperations between an AV and the others. Further, an evaluation is designed to make a decision on lane change, in which safety, efficiency and comfort are taken into consideration. Thereafter, we propose a motion planning algorithm based on model predictive control (MPC), which incorporates AV's decision and surrounding vehicles' interactive behaviors into constraints so as to avoid collisions during lane change. Quantitative testing results show that compared with the methods without an interactive prediction, our method enhances driving efficiencies of the AV and other vehicles by 14.8$\%$ and 2.6$\%$ respectively, which indicates that a proper utilization of vehicle interactions can effectively reduce the conservatism of the AV and promote the cooperation between the AV and others.

Solving Large-Scale Multi-Objective Optimization via Probabilistic Prediction Model

The main feature of large-scale multi-objective optimization problems (LSMOP) is to optimize multiple conflicting objectives while considering thousands of decision variables at the same time. An efficient LSMOP algorithm should have the ability to escape the local optimal solution from the huge search space and find the global optimal. Most of the current researches focus on how to deal with decision variables. However, due to the large number of decision variables, it is easy to lead to high computational cost. Maintaining the diversity of the population is one of the effective ways to improve search efficiency. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic prediction model based on trend prediction model and generating-filtering strategy, called LT-PPM, to tackle the LSMOP. The proposed method enhances the diversity of the population through importance sampling. At the same time, due to the adoption of an individual-based evolution mechanism, the computational cost of the proposed method is independent of the number of decision variables, thus avoiding the problem of exponential growth of the search space. We compared the proposed algorithm with several state-of-the-art algorithms for different benchmark functions. The experimental results and complexity analysis have demonstrated that the proposed algorithm has significant improvement in terms of its performance and computational efficiency in large-scale multi-objective optimization.