Stress-Relief Annealing: Polynomial-Time Simulation-Free Layout Optimization for Automated Warehouses

We study the problem of optimizing physical layouts for automated warehouses, where hundreds to thousands of robots are coordinated to transport packages. Previous works have shown that optimizing the warehouse layout (e.g., the physical location of the storage shelves) significantly improves throughput. However, state-of-the-art layout optimization approaches are based on evolutionary optimization methods, which treat the entire warehouse as a black box and rely on random mutation to search for high-quality layouts. While the optimization outcomes are promising, these methods require a massive number of simulations to evaluate candidate solutions, making them sample-inefficient. In this paper, we present Stress-Relief Annealing (SRA), a polynomial-time simulation-free layout optimization algorithm. SRA turns the task demand into a per-vertex \emph{stress field} that predicts where traffic will concentrate in the warehouse; the field's peak provably caps the throughput. Our experimental results show that (1) SRA improves both the throughput and the scalability of a human-designed warehouse, roughly doubling the number of robots it can sustain, (2) it matches or exceeds the throughput of the evolutionary baselines while taking only $19$ minutes on one CPU core, against their $25{,}000$ simulations and $25$ hours on a $64$-core machine, and (3) the gain generalizes across different Multi-Agent Path Finding algorithms, non-uniform task demands, and a warehouse with doubled dimensions.

Unified-IoU: For High-Quality Object Detection

Object detection is an important part in the field of computer vision, and the effect of object detection is directly determined by the regression accuracy of the prediction box. As the key to model training, IoU (Intersection over Union) greatly shows the difference between the current prediction box and the Ground Truth box. Subsequent researchers have continuously added more considerations to IoU, such as center distance, aspect ratio, and so on. However, there is an upper limit to just refining the geometric differences; And there is a potential connection between the new consideration index and the IoU itself, and the direct addition or subtraction between the two may lead to the problem of "over-consideration". Based on this, we propose a new IoU loss function, called Unified-IoU (UIoU), which is more concerned with the weight assignment between different quality prediction boxes. Specifically, the loss function dynamically shifts the model's attention from low-quality prediction boxes to high-quality prediction boxes in a novel way to enhance the model's detection performance on high-precision or intensive datasets and achieve a balance in training speed. Our proposed method achieves better performance on multiple datasets, especially at a high IoU threshold, UIoU has a more significant improvement effect compared with other improved IoU losses. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/lxj-drifter/UIOU_files.

A lightweight YOLOv5-FFM model for occlusion pedestrian detection

The development of autonomous driving technology must be inseparable from pedestrian detection. Because of the fast speed of the vehicle, the accuracy and real-time performance of the pedestrian detection algorithm are very important. YOLO, as an efficient and simple one-stage target detection method, is often used for pedestrian detection in various environments. However, this series of detectors face some challenges, such as excessive computation and undesirable detection rate when facing occluded pedestrians. In this paper, we propose an improved lightweight YOLOv5 model to deal with these problems. This model can achieve better pedestrian detection accuracy with fewer floating-point operations (FLOPs), especially for occluded targets. In order to achieve the above goals, we made improvements based on the YOLOv5 model framework and introduced Ghost module and SE block. Furthermore, we designed a local feature fusion module (FFM) to deal with occlusion in pedestrian detection. To verify the validity of our method, two datasets, Citypersons and CUHK Occlusion, were selected for the experiment. The experimental results show that, compared with the original yolov5s model, the average precision (AP) of our method is significantly improved, while the number of parameters is reduced by 27.9% and FLOPs are reduced by 19.0%.