"Push-Grasp-Suction"Integrated Network for Ambidextrous Robot Picking

Object picking in cluttered scenes is a widely investigated field of robot manipulation, however, ambidextrous robot picking is still an important and challenging issue. We found the fusion of different prehensile actions (grasp and suction) can expand the range of objects that can be picked by robot, and the fusion of prehensile action and nonprehensile action (push) can expand the picking space of ambidextrous robot. In this paper, we propose a "Push-Grasp-Suction" (PGS) integrated network for ambidextrous robot picking through the fusion of different prehensile actions and the fusion of prehensile action and nonprehensile aciton. The prehensile branch of PGS takes point clouds as input, and the 6-DoF picking configuration of grasp and suction in cluttered scenes are generated by multi-task point cloud learning. The nonprehensile branch with depth image input generates instance segmentation map and push configuration, cooperating with the prehensile actions to complete the picking of objects out of single-arm space. PGS generalizes well in real scene and achieves state-of-the-art picking performance.

Self-Supervised Node Representation Learning via Node-to-Neighbourhood Alignment

Self-supervised node representation learning aims to learn node representations from unlabelled graphs that rival the supervised counterparts. The key towards learning informative node representations lies in how to effectively gain contextual information from the graph structure. In this work, we present simple-yet-effective self-supervised node representation learning via aligning the hidden representations of nodes and their neighbourhood. Our first idea achieves such node-to-neighbourhood alignment by directly maximizing the mutual information between their representations, which, we prove theoretically, plays the role of graph smoothing. Our framework is optimized via a surrogate contrastive loss and a Topology-Aware Positive Sampling (TAPS) strategy is proposed to sample positives by considering the structural dependencies between nodes, which enables offline positive selection. Considering the excessive memory overheads of contrastive learning, we further propose a negative-free solution, where the main contribution is a Graph Signal Decorrelation (GSD) constraint to avoid representation collapse and over-smoothing. The GSD constraint unifies some of the existing constraints and can be used to derive new implementations to combat representation collapse. By applying our methods on top of simple MLP-based node representation encoders, we learn node representations that achieve promising node classification performance on a set of graph-structured datasets from small- to large-scale.

Delving Deep into Simplicity Bias for Long-Tailed Image Recognition

Simplicity Bias (SB) is a phenomenon that deep neural networks tend to rely favorably on simpler predictive patterns but ignore some complex features when applied to supervised discriminative tasks. In this work, we investigate SB in long-tailed image recognition and find the tail classes suffer more severely from SB, which harms the generalization performance of such underrepresented classes. We empirically report that self-supervised learning (SSL) can mitigate SB and perform in complementary to the supervised counterpart by enriching the features extracted from tail samples and consequently taking better advantage of such rare samples. However, standard SSL methods are designed without explicitly considering the inherent data distribution in terms of classes and may not be optimal for long-tailed distributed data. To address this limitation, we propose a novel SSL method tailored to imbalanced data. It leverages SSL by triple diverse levels, i.e., holistic-, partial-, and augmented-level, to enhance the learning of predictive complex patterns, which provides the potential to overcome the severe SB on tail data. Both quantitative and qualitative experimental results on five long-tailed benchmark datasets show our method can effectively mitigate SB and significantly outperform the competing state-of-the-arts.

Industrial computed tomography based intelligent non-destructive testing method for power capacitor

Power capacitor device is a widely used reactive power compensation equipment in power transmission and distribution system which can easily have internal fault and therefore affects the safe operation of the power system. An intelligent non-destructive testing (I-NDT) method based on ICT is proposed to test the quality of power capacitors automatically in this study. The internal structure of power capacitors would be scanned by the ICT device and then defects could be recognized by the SSD algorithm. Moreover, the data data augmentation algorithm is used to extend the image set to improve the stability and accuracy of the trained SSD model.

Multimodal Video Adapter for Parameter Efficient Video Text Retrieval

State-of-the-art video-text retrieval (VTR) methods usually fully fine-tune the pre-trained model (e.g. CLIP) on specific datasets, which may suffer from substantial storage costs in practical applications since a separate model per task needs to be stored. To overcome this issue, we present the premier work on performing parameter-efficient VTR from the pre-trained model, i.e., only a small number of parameters are tunable while freezing the backbone. Towards this goal, we propose a new method dubbed Multimodal Video Adapter (MV-Adapter) for efficiently transferring the knowledge in the pre-trained CLIP from image-text to video-text. Specifically, MV-Adapter adopts bottleneck structures in both video and text branches and introduces two novel components. The first is a Temporal Adaptation Module employed in the video branch to inject global and local temporal contexts. We also learn weights calibrations to adapt to the dynamic variations across frames. The second is a Cross-Modal Interaction Module that generates weights for video/text branches through a shared parameter space, for better aligning between modalities. Thanks to above innovations, MV-Adapter can achieve on-par or better performance than standard fine-tuning with negligible parameters overhead. Notably, on five widely used VTR benchmarks (MSR-VTT, MSVD, LSMDC, DiDemo, and ActivityNet), MV-Adapter consistently outperforms various competing methods in V2T/T2V tasks with large margins. Codes will be released.

Transferring General Multimodal Pretrained Models to Text Recognition

This paper proposes a new method, OFA-OCR, to transfer multimodal pretrained models to text recognition. Specifically, we recast text recognition as image captioning and directly transfer a unified vision-language pretrained model to the end task. Without pretraining on large-scale annotated or synthetic text recognition data, OFA-OCR outperforms the baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance in the Chinese text recognition benchmark. Additionally, we construct an OCR pipeline with OFA-OCR, and we demonstrate that it can achieve competitive performance with the product-level API. The code (https://github.com/OFA-Sys/OFA) and demo (https://modelscope.cn/studios/damo/ofa_ocr_pipeline/summary) are publicly available.

Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection Based on Cross-Batch Clustering Guidance

Weakly supervised video anomaly detection (WSVAD) is a challenging task since only video-level labels are available for training. In previous studies, the discriminative power of the learned features is not strong enough, and the data imbalance resulting from the mini-batch training strategy is ignored. To address these two issues, we propose a novel WSVAD method based on cross-batch clustering guidance. To enhance the discriminative power of features, we propose a batch clustering based loss to encourage a clustering branch to generate distinct normal and abnormal clusters based on a batch of data. Meanwhile, we design a cross-batch learning strategy by introducing clustering results from previous mini-batches to reduce the impact of data imbalance. In addition, we propose to generate more accurate segment-level anomaly scores based on batch clustering guidance further improving the performance of WSVAD. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

OFASys: A Multi-Modal Multi-Task Learning System for Building Generalist Models

Generalist models, which are capable of performing diverse multi-modal tasks in a task-agnostic way within a single model, have been explored recently. Being, hopefully, an alternative to approaching general-purpose AI, existing generalist models are still at an early stage, where modality and task coverage is limited. To empower multi-modal task-scaling and speed up this line of research, we release a generalist model learning system, OFASys, built on top of a declarative task interface named multi-modal instruction. At the core of OFASys is the idea of decoupling multi-modal task representations from the underlying model implementations. In OFASys, a task involving multiple modalities can be defined declaratively even with just a single line of code. The system automatically generates task plans from such instructions for training and inference. It also facilitates multi-task training for diverse multi-modal workloads. As a starting point, we provide presets of 7 different modalities and 23 highly-diverse example tasks in OFASys, with which we also develop a first-in-kind, single model, OFA+, that can handle text, image, speech, video, and motion data. The single OFA+ model achieves 95% performance in average with only 16% parameters of 15 task-finetuned models, showcasing the performance reliability of multi-modal task-scaling provided by OFASys. Available at https://github.com/OFA-Sys/OFASys

Generalizable Person Re-Identification via Viewpoint Alignment and Fusion

In the current person Re-identification (ReID) methods, most domain generalization works focus on dealing with style differences between domains while largely ignoring unpredictable camera view change, which we identify as another major factor leading to a poor generalization of ReID methods. To tackle the viewpoint change, this work proposes to use a 3D dense pose estimation model and a texture mapping module to map the pedestrian images to canonical view images. Due to the imperfection of the texture mapping module, the canonical view images may lose the discriminative detail clues from the original images, and thus directly using them for ReID will inevitably result in poor performance. To handle this issue, we propose to fuse the original image and canonical view image via a transformer-based module. The key insight of this design is that the cross-attention mechanism in the transformer could be an ideal solution to align the discriminative texture clues from the original image with the canonical view image, which could compensate for the low-quality texture information of the canonical view image. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method can lead to superior performance over the existing approaches in various evaluation settings.