MLP Can Be A Good Transformer Learner

Self-attention mechanism is the key of the Transformer but often criticized for its computation demands. Previous token pruning works motivate their methods from the view of computation redundancy but still need to load the full network and require same memory costs. This paper introduces a novel strategy that simplifies vision transformers and reduces computational load through the selective removal of non-essential attention layers, guided by entropy considerations. We identify that regarding the attention layer in bottom blocks, their subsequent MLP layers, i.e. two feed-forward layers, can elicit the same entropy quantity. Meanwhile, the accompanied MLPs are under-exploited since they exhibit smaller feature entropy compared to those MLPs in the top blocks. Therefore, we propose to integrate the uninformative attention layers into their subsequent counterparts by degenerating them into identical mapping, yielding only MLP in certain transformer blocks. Experimental results on ImageNet-1k show that the proposed method can remove 40% attention layer of DeiT-B, improving throughput and memory bound without performance compromise. Code is available at https://github.com/sihaoevery/lambda_vit.

AlignMiF: Geometry-Aligned Multimodal Implicit Field for LiDAR-Camera Joint Synthesis

Neural implicit fields have been a de facto standard in novel view synthesis. Recently, there exist some methods exploring fusing multiple modalities within a single field, aiming to share implicit features from different modalities to enhance reconstruction performance. However, these modalities often exhibit misaligned behaviors: optimizing for one modality, such as LiDAR, can adversely affect another, like camera performance, and vice versa. In this work, we conduct comprehensive analyses on the multimodal implicit field of LiDAR-camera joint synthesis, revealing the underlying issue lies in the misalignment of different sensors. Furthermore, we introduce AlignMiF, a geometrically aligned multimodal implicit field with two proposed modules: Geometry-Aware Alignment (GAA) and Shared Geometry Initialization (SGI). These modules effectively align the coarse geometry across different modalities, significantly enhancing the fusion process between LiDAR and camera data. Through extensive experiments across various datasets and scenes, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in facilitating better interaction between LiDAR and camera modalities within a unified neural field. Specifically, our proposed AlignMiF, achieves remarkable improvement over recent implicit fusion methods (+2.01 and +3.11 image PSNR on the KITTI-360 and Waymo datasets) and consistently surpasses single modality performance (13.8% and 14.2% reduction in LiDAR Chamfer Distance on the respective datasets).

Digital Twin Mobility Profiling: A Spatio-Temporal Graph Learning Approach

With the arrival of the big data era, mobility profiling has become a viable method of utilizing enormous amounts of mobility data to create an intelligent transportation system. Mobility profiling can extract potential patterns in urban traffic from mobility data and is critical for a variety of traffic-related applications. However, due to the high level of complexity and the huge amount of data, mobility profiling faces huge challenges. Digital Twin (DT) technology paves the way for cost-effective and performance-optimised management by digitally creating a virtual representation of the network to simulate its behaviour. In order to capture the complex spatio-temporal features in traffic scenario, we construct alignment diagrams to assist in completing the spatio-temporal correlation representation and design dilated alignment convolution network (DACN) to learn the fine-grained correlations, i.e., spatio-temporal interactions. We propose a digital twin mobility profiling (DTMP) framework to learn node profiles on a mobility network DT model. Extensive experiments have been conducted upon three real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of DTMP.

On the Promises and Challenges of Multimodal Foundation Models for Geographical, Environmental, Agricultural, and Urban Planning Applications

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has heightened interest in their potential for multimodal applications that integrate language and vision. This paper explores the capabilities of GPT-4V in the realms of geography, environmental science, agriculture, and urban planning by evaluating its performance across a variety of tasks. Data sources comprise satellite imagery, aerial photos, ground-level images, field images, and public datasets. The model is evaluated on a series of tasks including geo-localization, textual data extraction from maps, remote sensing image classification, visual question answering, crop type identification, disease/pest/weed recognition, chicken behavior analysis, agricultural object counting, urban planning knowledge question answering, and plan generation. The results indicate the potential of GPT-4V in geo-localization, land cover classification, visual question answering, and basic image understanding. However, there are limitations in several tasks requiring fine-grained recognition and precise counting. While zero-shot learning shows promise, performance varies across problem domains and image complexities. The work provides novel insights into GPT-4V's capabilities and limitations for real-world geospatial, environmental, agricultural, and urban planning challenges. Further research should focus on augmenting the model's knowledge and reasoning for specialized domains through expanded training. Overall, the analysis demonstrates foundational multimodal intelligence, highlighting the potential of multimodal foundation models (FMs) to advance interdisciplinary applications at the nexus of computer vision and language.

ResoNet: Robust and Explainable ENSO Forecasts with Hybrid Convolution and Transformer Networks

Recent studies have shown that deep learning (DL) models can skillfully predict the El Ni\~no-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) forecasts over 1.5 years ahead. However, concerns regarding the reliability of predictions made by DL methods persist, including potential overfitting issues and lack of interpretability. Here, we propose ResoNet, a DL model that combines convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer architectures. This hybrid architecture design enables our model to adequately capture local SSTA as well as long-range inter-basin interactions across oceans. We show that ResoNet can robustly predict ESNO at lead times between 19 and 26 months, thus outperforming existing approaches in terms of the forecast horizon. According to an explainability method applied to ResoNet predictions of El Ni\~no and La Ni\~na events from 1- to 18-month lead, we find that it predicts the Ni\~no3.4 index based on multiple physically reasonable mechanisms, such as the Recharge Oscillator concept, Seasonal Footprint Mechanism, and Indian Ocean capacitor effect. Moreover, we demonstrate that for the first time, the asymmetry between El Ni\~no and La Ni\~na development can be captured by ResoNet. Our results could help alleviate skepticism about applying DL models for ENSO prediction and encourage more attempts to discover and predict climate phenomena using AI methods.

OpenSight: A Simple Open-Vocabulary Framework for LiDAR-Based Object Detection

Traditional LiDAR-based object detection research primarily focuses on closed-set scenarios, which falls short in complex real-world applications. Directly transferring existing 2D open-vocabulary models with some known LiDAR classes for open-vocabulary ability, however, tends to suffer from over-fitting problems: The obtained model will detect the known objects, even presented with a novel category. In this paper, we propose OpenSight, a more advanced 2D-3D modeling framework for LiDAR-based open-vocabulary detection. OpenSight utilizes 2D-3D geometric priors for the initial discernment and localization of generic objects, followed by a more specific semantic interpretation of the detected objects. The process begins by generating 2D boxes for generic objects from the accompanying camera images of LiDAR. These 2D boxes, together with LiDAR points, are then lifted back into the LiDAR space to estimate corresponding 3D boxes. For better generic object perception, our framework integrates both temporal and spatial-aware constraints. Temporal awareness correlates the predicted 3D boxes across consecutive timestamps, recalibrating the missed or inaccurate boxes. The spatial awareness randomly places some ``precisely'' estimated 3D boxes at varying distances, increasing the visibility of generic objects. To interpret the specific semantics of detected objects, we develop a cross-modal alignment and fusion module to first align 3D features with 2D image embeddings and then fuse the aligned 3D-2D features for semantic decoding. Our experiments indicate that our method establishes state-of-the-art open-vocabulary performance on widely used 3D detection benchmarks and effectively identifies objects for new categories of interest.

BEVHeight++: Toward Robust Visual Centric 3D Object Detection

While most recent autonomous driving system focuses on developing perception methods on ego-vehicle sensors, people tend to overlook an alternative approach to leverage intelligent roadside cameras to extend the perception ability beyond the visual range. We discover that the state-of-the-art vision-centric bird's eye view detection methods have inferior performances on roadside cameras. This is because these methods mainly focus on recovering the depth regarding the camera center, where the depth difference between the car and the ground quickly shrinks while the distance increases. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach, dubbed BEVHeight++, to address this issue. In essence, we regress the height to the ground to achieve a distance-agnostic formulation to ease the optimization process of camera-only perception methods. By incorporating both height and depth encoding techniques, we achieve a more accurate and robust projection from 2D to BEV spaces. On popular 3D detection benchmarks of roadside cameras, our method surpasses all previous vision-centric methods by a significant margin. In terms of the ego-vehicle scenario, our BEVHeight++ possesses superior over depth-only methods. Specifically, it yields a notable improvement of +1.9% NDS and +1.1% mAP over BEVDepth when evaluated on the nuScenes validation set. Moreover, on the nuScenes test set, our method achieves substantial advancements, with an increase of +2.8% NDS and +1.7% mAP, respectively.

BEVHeight: A Robust Framework for Vision-based Roadside 3D Object Detection

While most recent autonomous driving system focuses on developing perception methods on ego-vehicle sensors, people tend to overlook an alternative approach to leverage intelligent roadside cameras to extend the perception ability beyond the visual range. We discover that the state-of-the-art vision-centric bird's eye view detection methods have inferior performances on roadside cameras. This is because these methods mainly focus on recovering the depth regarding the camera center, where the depth difference between the car and the ground quickly shrinks while the distance increases. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach, dubbed BEVHeight, to address this issue. In essence, instead of predicting the pixel-wise depth, we regress the height to the ground to achieve a distance-agnostic formulation to ease the optimization process of camera-only perception methods. On popular 3D detection benchmarks of roadside cameras, our method surpasses all previous vision-centric methods by a significant margin. The code is available at {\url{https://github.com/ADLab-AutoDrive/BEVHeight}}.

Failure-informed adaptive sampling for PINNs, Part II: combining with re-sampling and subset simulation

This is the second part of our series works on failure-informed adaptive sampling for physic-informed neural networks (FI-PINNs). In our previous work \cite{gao2022failure}, we have presented an adaptive sampling framework by using the failure probability as the posterior error indicator, where the truncated Gaussian model has been adopted for estimating the indicator. In this work, we present two novel extensions to FI-PINNs. The first extension consist in combining with a re-sampling technique, so that the new algorithm can maintain a constant training size. This is achieved through a cosine-annealing, which gradually transforms the sampling of collocation points from uniform to adaptive via training progress. The second extension is to present the subset simulation algorithm as the posterior model (instead of the truncated Gaussian model) for estimating the error indicator, which can more effectively estimate the failure probability and generate new effective training points in the failure region. We investigate the performance of the new approach using several challenging problems, and numerical experiments demonstrate a significant improvement over the original algorithm.

Hierarchical shrinkage Gaussian processes: applications to computer code emulation and dynamical system recovery

In many areas of science and engineering, computer simulations are widely used as proxies for physical experiments, which can be infeasible or unethical. Such simulations can often be computationally expensive, and an emulator can be trained to efficiently predict the desired response surface. A widely-used emulator is the Gaussian process (GP), which provides a flexible framework for efficient prediction and uncertainty quantification. Standard GPs, however, do not capture structured sparsity on the underlying response surface, which is present in many applications, particularly in the physical sciences. We thus propose a new hierarchical shrinkage GP (HierGP), which incorporates such structure via cumulative shrinkage priors within a GP framework. We show that the HierGP implicitly embeds the well-known principles of effect sparsity, heredity and hierarchy for analysis of experiments, which allows our model to identify structured sparse features from the response surface with limited data. We propose efficient posterior sampling algorithms for model training and prediction, and prove desirable consistency properties for the HierGP. Finally, we demonstrate the improved performance of HierGP over existing models, in a suite of numerical experiments and an application to dynamical system recovery.