SUNDIAL: 3D Satellite Understanding through Direct, Ambient, and Complex Lighting Decomposition

3D modeling from satellite imagery is essential in areas of environmental science, urban planning, agriculture, and disaster response. However, traditional 3D modeling techniques face unique challenges in the remote sensing context, including limited multi-view baselines over extensive regions, varying direct, ambient, and complex illumination conditions, and time-varying scene changes across captures. In this work, we introduce SUNDIAL, a comprehensive approach to 3D reconstruction of satellite imagery using neural radiance fields. We jointly learn satellite scene geometry, illumination components, and sun direction in this single-model approach, and propose a secondary shadow ray casting technique to 1) improve scene geometry using oblique sun angles to render shadows, 2) enable physically-based disentanglement of scene albedo and illumination, and 3) determine the components of illumination from direct, ambient (sky), and complex sources. To achieve this, we incorporate lighting cues and geometric priors from remote sensing literature in a neural rendering approach, modeling physical properties of satellite scenes such as shadows, scattered sky illumination, and complex illumination and shading of vegetation and water. We evaluate the performance of SUNDIAL against existing NeRF-based techniques for satellite scene modeling and demonstrate improved scene and lighting disentanglement, novel view and lighting rendering, and geometry and sun direction estimation on challenging scenes with small baselines, sparse inputs, and variable illumination.

NAC-TCN: Temporal Convolutional Networks with Causal Dilated Neighborhood Attention for Emotion Understanding

In the task of emotion recognition from videos, a key improvement has been to focus on emotions over time rather than a single frame. There are many architectures to address this task such as GRUs, LSTMs, Self-Attention, Transformers, and Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs). However, these methods suffer from high memory usage, large amounts of operations, or poor gradients. We propose a method known as Neighborhood Attention with Convolutions TCN (NAC-TCN) which incorporates the benefits of attention and Temporal Convolutional Networks while ensuring that causal relationships are understood which results in a reduction in computation and memory cost. We accomplish this by introducing a causal version of Dilated Neighborhood Attention while incorporating it with convolutions. Our model achieves comparable, better, or state-of-the-art performance over TCNs, TCAN, LSTMs, and GRUs while requiring fewer parameters on standard emotion recognition datasets. We publish our code online for easy reproducibility and use in other projects.

ImageNet-OOD: Deciphering Modern Out-of-Distribution Detection Algorithms

The task of out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is notoriously ill-defined. Earlier works focused on new-class detection, aiming to identify label-altering data distribution shifts, also known as "semantic shift." However, recent works argue for a focus on failure detection, expanding the OOD evaluation framework to account for label-preserving data distribution shifts, also known as "covariate shift." Intriguingly, under this new framework, complex OOD detectors that were previously considered state-of-the-art now perform similarly to, or even worse than the simple maximum softmax probability baseline. This raises the question: what are the latest OOD detectors actually detecting? Deciphering the behavior of OOD detection algorithms requires evaluation datasets that decouples semantic shift and covariate shift. To aid our investigations, we present ImageNet-OOD, a clean semantic shift dataset that minimizes the interference of covariate shift. Through comprehensive experiments, we show that OOD detectors are more sensitive to covariate shift than to semantic shift, and the benefits of recent OOD detection algorithms on semantic shift detection is minimal. Our dataset and analyses provide important insights for guiding the design of future OOD detectors.

Confidence-Calibrated Ensemble Dense Phrase Retrieval

In this paper, we consider the extent to which the transformer-based Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) algorithm, developed by (Karpukhin et. al. 2020), can be optimized without further pre-training. Our method involves two particular insights: we apply the DPR context encoder at various phrase lengths (e.g. one-sentence versus five-sentence segments), and we take a confidence-calibrated ensemble prediction over all of these different segmentations. This somewhat exhaustive approach achieves start-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets such as Google NQ and SQuAD. We also apply our method to domain-specific datasets, and the results suggest how different granularities are optimal for different domains

Decision-Dependent Distributionally Robust Markov Decision Process Method in Dynamic Epidemic Control

In this paper, we present a Distributionally Robust Markov Decision Process (DRMDP) approach for addressing the dynamic epidemic control problem. The Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered (SEIR) model is widely used to represent the stochastic spread of infectious diseases, such as COVID-19. While Markov Decision Processes (MDP) offers a mathematical framework for identifying optimal actions, such as vaccination and transmission-reducing intervention, to combat disease spreading according to the SEIR model. However, uncertainties in these scenarios demand a more robust approach that is less reliant on error-prone assumptions. The primary objective of our study is to introduce a new DRMDP framework that allows for an ambiguous distribution of transition dynamics. Specifically, we consider the worst-case distribution of these transition probabilities within a decision-dependent ambiguity set. To overcome the computational complexities associated with policy determination, we propose an efficient Real-Time Dynamic Programming (RTDP) algorithm that is capable of computing optimal policies based on the reformulated DRMDP model in an accurate, timely, and scalable manner. Comparative analysis against the classic MDP model demonstrates that the DRMDP achieves a lower proportion of infections and susceptibilities at a reduced cost.

Impact-Invariant Control: Maximizing Control Authority During Impacts

When legged robots impact their environment, they undergo large changes in their velocities in a short amount of time. Measuring and applying feedback to these velocities is challenging, further complicated by uncertainty in the impact model and impact timing. This work proposes a general framework for adapting feedback control during impact by projecting the control objectives to a subspace that is invariant to the impact event. The resultant controller is robust to uncertainties in the impact event while maintaining maximum control authority over the impact-invariant subspace. We demonstrate the improved performance of the projection over other commonly used heuristics on a walking controller for a planar five-link-biped. The projection is also applied to jumping, box jumping on to a platform 0.4 m tall, and running controllers for the compliant 3D bipedal robot, Cassie. The modification is easily applied to these various controllers and is a critical component to deploying on the physical robot.

Validating Robotics Simulators on Real World Impacts

A realistic simulation environment is an essential tool in every roboticist's toolkit, with uses ranging from planning and control to training policies with reinforcement learning. Despite the centrality of simulation in modern robotics, little work has been done to compare the performance of robotics simulators against real-world data, especially for scenarios involving dynamic motions with high speed impact events. Handling dynamic contact is the computational bottleneck for most simulations, and thus the modeling and algorithmic choices surrounding impacts and friction form the largest distinctions between popular tools. Here, we evaluate the ability of several simulators to reproduce real-world trajectories involving impacts. Using experimental data, we identify system-specific contact parameters of popular simulators Drake, MuJoCo, and Bullet, analyzing the effects of modeling choices around these parameters. For the simple example of a cube tossed onto a table, simulators capture inelastic impacts well while failing to capture elastic impacts. For the higher-dimensional case of a Cassie biped landing from a jump, the simulators capture the bulk motion well but the accuracy is limited by numerous model differences between the real robot and the simulators.

Impact Invariant Control with Applications to Bipedal Locomotion

When legged robots impact their environment, they undergo large changes in their velocities in a small amount of time. Measuring and applying feedback to these velocities is challenging, and is further complicated due to uncertainty in the impact model and impact timing. This work proposes a general framework for adapting feedback control during impact by projecting the control objectives to a subspace that is invariant to the impact event. The resultant controller is robust to uncertainties in the impact event while maintaining maximum control authority over the impact invariant subspace. We demonstrate the utility of the projection on a walking controller for a planar five-link-biped and on a jumping controller for a compliant 3D bipedal robot, Cassie. The effectiveness of our method is shown to translate well on hardware.

Data-Driven Investigative Journalism For Connectas Dataset

The following paper explores the possibility of using Machine Learning algorithms to detect the cases of corruption and malpractice by governments. The dataset used by the authors contains information about several government contracts in Colombia from year 2007 to 2012. The authors begin with exploring and cleaning the data, followed by which they perform feature engineering before finally implementing Machine Learning models to detect anomalies in the given dataset.