Neural Content Extraction for Poster Generation of Scientific Papers

The problem of poster generation for scientific papers is under-investigated. Posters often present the most important information of papers, and the task can be considered as a special form of document summarization. Previous studies focus mainly on poster layout and panel composition, while neglecting the importance of content extraction. Besides, their datasets are not publicly available, which hinders further research. In this paper, we construct a benchmark dataset from scratch for this task. Then we propose a three-step framework to tackle this task and focus on the content extraction step in this study. To get both textual and visual elements of a poster panel, a neural extractive model is proposed to extract text, figures and tables of a paper section simultaneously. We conduct experiments on the dataset and also perform ablation study. Results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed model. The dataset and code will be released.

POEM: 1-bit Point-wise Operations based on Expectation-Maximization for Efficient Point Cloud Processing

Real-time point cloud processing is fundamental for lots of computer vision tasks, while still challenged by the computational problem on resource-limited edge devices. To address this issue, we implement XNOR-Net-based binary neural networks (BNNs) for an efficient point cloud processing, but its performance is severely suffered due to two main drawbacks, Gaussian-distributed weights and non-learnable scale factor. In this paper, we introduce point-wise operations based on Expectation-Maximization (POEM) into BNNs for efficient point cloud processing. The EM algorithm can efficiently constrain weights for a robust bi-modal distribution. We lead a well-designed reconstruction loss to calculate learnable scale factors to enhance the representation capacity of 1-bit fully-connected (Bi-FC) layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our POEM surpasses existing the state-of-the-art binary point cloud networks by a significant margin, up to 6.7 %.

An adaptive recursive sliding mode attitude control for tiltrotor UAV in flight mode transition based on super-twisting extended state observer

With the characteristics of vertical take-off and landing and long endurance, tiltrotor has attracted considerable attention in recent decades for its potential applications in civil and scientific research. However, the problems of strong couplings, nonlinear characteristics and mismatched disturbances inevitably exist in the tiltrotor, which bring great challenges to the controller design in transition mode. In this paper, we combined a super-twisting extended state observer (STESO) with an adaptive recursive sliding mode control (ARSMC) together to design a tiltrotor aircraft attitude system controller in transition mode using STESO-ARSMC (SAC). Firstly, the six degrees of freedom (DOF) nonlinear mathematical model of tiltrotor is established. Secondly, the states and disturbances are estimated by the STES observer. Thirdly, ARSM controller is designed to achieve finite time convergence. The Lyapunov function is used to testify the convergence of the tiltrotor UAV system. The new aspect is that the assessments of the states are incorporated into the control rules to adjust for disruptions. When compared to prior techniques, the control system proposed in this work can considerably enhance anti-disturbance performance. Finally, simulation tests are used to demonstrate the efficacy of the suggested technique.

Collage: Automated Integration of Deep Learning Backends

Strong demands for efficient deployment of Deep Learning (DL) applications prompt the rapid development of a rich DL ecosystem. To keep up with its fast advancement, it is crucial for DL frameworks to efficiently integrate a variety of optimized libraries and runtimes as their backends and generate the fastest possible executable by using them properly. However, current DL frameworks require significant manual effort to integrate diverse backends and often fail to deliver high performance. In this paper, we propose Collage, an automatic framework for integrating DL backends. Collage provides a backend registration interface that allows users to precisely specify the capability of various backends. By leveraging the specifications of available backends, Collage searches for an optimized backend placement for a given workload and execution environment. Our evaluation shows that Collage automatically integrates multiple backends together without manual intervention, and outperforms existing frameworks by 1.21x, 1.39x, 1.40x on two different NVIDIA GPUs and an Intel CPU respectively.

End-to-end Ultrasound Frame to Volume Registration

Fusing intra-operative 2D transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) image with pre-operative 3D magnetic resonance (MR) volume to guide prostate biopsy can significantly increase the yield. However, such a multimodal 2D/3D registration problem is a very challenging task. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end frame-to-volume registration network (FVR-Net), which can efficiently bridge the previous research gaps by aligning a 2D TRUS frame with a 3D TRUS volume without requiring hardware tracking. The proposed FVR-Net utilizes a dual-branch feature extraction module to extract the information from TRUS frame and volume to estimate transformation parameters. We also introduce a differentiable 2D slice sampling module which allows gradients backpropagating from an unsupervised image similarity loss for content correspondence learning. Our model shows superior efficiency for real-time interventional guidance with highly competitive registration accuracy.

Cross-modal Attention for MRI and Ultrasound Volume Registration

Prostate cancer biopsy benefits from accurate fusion of transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) and magnetic resonance (MR) images. In the past few years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been proved powerful in extracting image features crucial for image registration. However, challenging applications and recent advances in computer vision suggest that CNNs are quite limited in its ability to understand spatial correspondence between features, a task in which the self-attention mechanism excels. This paper aims to develop a self-attention mechanism specifically for cross-modal image registration. Our proposed cross-modal attention block effectively maps each of the features in one volume to all features in the corresponding volume. Our experimental results demonstrate that a CNN network designed with the cross-modal attention block embedded outperforms an advanced CNN network 10 times of its size. We also incorporated visualization techniques to improve the interpretability of our network. The source code of our work is available at https://github.com/DIAL-RPI/Attention-Reg .

RGB Matters: Learning 7-DoF Grasp Poses on Monocular RGBD Images

General object grasping is an important yet unsolved problem in the field of robotics. Most of the current methods either generate grasp poses with few DoF that fail to cover most of the success grasps, or only take the unstable depth image or point cloud as input which may lead to poor results in some cases. In this paper, we propose RGBD-Grasp, a pipeline that solves this problem by decoupling 7-DoF grasp detection into two sub-tasks where RGB and depth information are processed separately. In the first stage, an encoder-decoder like convolutional neural network Angle-View Net(AVN) is proposed to predict the SO(3) orientation of the gripper at every location of the image. Consequently, a Fast Analytic Searching(FAS) module calculates the opening width and the distance of the gripper to the grasp point. By decoupling the grasp detection problem and introducing the stable RGB modality, our pipeline alleviates the requirement for the high-quality depth image and is robust to depth sensor noise. We achieve state-of-the-art results on GraspNet-1Billion dataset compared with several baselines. Real robot experiments on a UR5 robot with an Intel Realsense camera and a Robotiq two-finger gripper show high success rates for both single object scenes and cluttered scenes. Our code and trained model will be made publicly available.

FlashP: An Analytical Pipeline for Real-time Forecasting of Time-Series Relational Data

Interactive response time is important in analytical pipelines for users to explore a sufficient number of possibilities and make informed business decisions. We consider a forecasting pipeline with large volumes of high-dimensional time series data. Real-time forecasting can be conducted in two steps. First, we specify the part of data to be focused on and the measure to be predicted by slicing, dicing, and aggregating the data. Second, a forecasting model is trained on the aggregated results to predict the trend of the specified measure. While there are a number of forecasting models available, the first step is the performance bottleneck. A natural idea is to utilize sampling to obtain approximate aggregations in real time as the input to train the forecasting model. Our scalable real-time forecasting system FlashP (Flash Prediction) is built based on this idea, with two major challenges to be resolved in this paper: first, we need to figure out how approximate aggregations affect the fitting of forecasting models, and forecasting results; and second, accordingly, what sampling algorithms we should use to obtain these approximate aggregations and how large the samples are. We introduce a new sampling scheme, called GSW sampling, and analyze error bounds for estimating aggregations using GSW samples. We introduce how to construct compact GSW samples with the existence of multiple measures to be analyzed. We conduct experiments to evaluate our solution and compare it with alternatives on real data.