OpenGraph: Open-Vocabulary Hierarchical 3D Graph Representation in Large-Scale Outdoor Environments

Environment representations endowed with sophisticated semantics are pivotal for facilitating seamless interaction between robots and humans, enabling them to effectively carry out various tasks. Open-vocabulary maps, powered by Visual-Language models (VLMs), possess inherent advantages, including zero-shot learning and support for open-set classes. However, existing open-vocabulary maps are primarily designed for small-scale environments, such as desktops or rooms, and are typically geared towards limited-area tasks involving robotic indoor navigation or in-place manipulation. They face challenges in direct generalization to outdoor environments characterized by numerous objects and complex tasks, owing to limitations in both understanding level and map structure. In this work, we propose OpenGraph, the first open-vocabulary hierarchical graph representation designed for large-scale outdoor environments. OpenGraph initially extracts instances and their captions from visual images, enhancing textual reasoning by encoding them. Subsequently, it achieves 3D incremental object-centric mapping with feature embedding by projecting images onto LiDAR point clouds. Finally, the environment is segmented based on lane graph connectivity to construct a hierarchical graph. Validation results from public dataset SemanticKITTI demonstrate that OpenGraph achieves the highest segmentation and query accuracy. The source code of OpenGraph is publicly available at https://github.com/BIT-DYN/OpenGraph.

Enhancing Multi-Hop Knowledge Graph Reasoning through Reward Shaping Techniques

In the realm of computational knowledge representation, Knowledge Graph Reasoning (KG-R) stands at the forefront of facilitating sophisticated inferential capabilities across multifarious domains. The quintessence of this research elucidates the employment of reinforcement learning (RL) strategies, notably the REINFORCE algorithm, to navigate the intricacies inherent in multi-hop KG-R. This investigation critically addresses the prevalent challenges introduced by the inherent incompleteness of Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which frequently results in erroneous inferential outcomes, manifesting as both false negatives and misleading positives. By partitioning the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) benchmark dataset into rich and sparse subsets, we investigate the efficacy of pre-trained BERT embeddings and Prompt Learning methodologies to refine the reward shaping process. This approach not only enhances the precision of multi-hop KG-R but also sets a new precedent for future research in the field, aiming to improve the robustness and accuracy of knowledge inference within complex KG frameworks. Our work contributes a novel perspective to the discourse on KG reasoning, offering a methodological advancement that aligns with the academic rigor and scholarly aspirations of the Natural journal, promising to invigorate further advancements in the realm of computational knowledge representation.

Integrated and Lightweight Design of Electro-hydraulic Ankle Prosthesis

For lower limb amputees, an active ankle joint prosthesis can provide basic mobility functions. This study focuses on an ankle joint prosthesis system based on the principle of electric-hydraulic actuation. By analyzing the characteristics of human gait cycles and the mechanics of ankle joint movement, a lightweight and integrated ankle joint prosthesis is designed, considering the requirements for normal ankle joint kinematics and dynamics. The components of the prosthesis are optimized through simulation and iterative improvements, while ensuring tight integration within minimal space. The design and simulation verification of the integrated lightweight prosthesis components are achieved. This research addresses the contradiction between the high output capability and the constraints on volume and weight in prosthetic devices.

ArGue: Attribute-Guided Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Models

Although soft prompt tuning is effective in efficiently adapting Vision-Language (V&L) models for downstream tasks, it shows limitations in dealing with distribution shifts. We address this issue with Attribute-Guided Prompt Tuning (ArGue), making three key contributions. 1) In contrast to the conventional approach of directly appending soft prompts preceding class names, we align the model with primitive visual attributes generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). We posit that a model's ability to express high confidence in these attributes signifies its capacity to discern the correct class rationales. 2) We introduce attribute sampling to eliminate disadvantageous attributes, thus only semantically meaningful attributes are preserved. 3) We propose negative prompting, explicitly enumerating class-agnostic attributes to activate spurious correlations and encourage the model to generate highly orthogonal probability distributions in relation to these negative features. In experiments, our method significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art prompt tuning methods on both novel class prediction and out-of-distribution generalization tasks.

Quaternion MLP Neural Networks Based on the Maximum Correntropy Criterion

We propose a gradient ascent algorithm for quaternion multilayer perceptron (MLP) networks based on the cost function of the maximum correntropy criterion (MCC). In the algorithm, we use the split quaternion activation function based on the generalized Hamilton-real quaternion gradient. By introducing a new quaternion operator, we first rewrite the early quaternion single layer perceptron algorithm. Secondly, we propose a gradient descent algorithm for quaternion multilayer perceptron based on the cost function of the mean square error (MSE). Finally, the MSE algorithm is extended to the MCC algorithm. Simulations show the feasibility of the proposed method.

Training with Product Digital Twins for AutoRetail Checkout

Automating the checkout process is important in smart retail, where users effortlessly pass products by hand through a camera, triggering automatic product detection, tracking, and counting. In this emerging area, due to the lack of annotated training data, we introduce a dataset comprised of product 3D models, which allows for fast, flexible, and large-scale training data generation through graphic engine rendering. Within this context, we discern an intriguing facet, because of the user "hands-on" approach, bias in user behavior leads to distinct patterns in the real checkout process. The existence of such patterns would compromise training effectiveness if training data fail to reflect the same. To address this user bias problem, we propose a training data optimization framework, i.e., training with digital twins (DtTrain). Specifically, we leverage the product 3D models and optimize their rendering viewpoint and illumination to generate "digital twins" that visually resemble representative user images. These digital twins, inherit product labels and, when augmented, form the Digital Twin training set (DT set). Because the digital twins individually mimic user bias, the resulting DT training set better reflects the characteristics of the target scenario and allows us to train more effective product detection and tracking models. In our experiment, we show that DT set outperforms training sets created by existing dataset synthesis methods in terms of counting accuracy. Moreover, by combining DT set with pseudo-labeled real checkout data, further improvement is observed. The code is available at https://github.com/yorkeyao/Automated-Retail-Checkout.

A General Divergence Modeling Strategy for Salient Object Detection

Salient object detection is subjective in nature, which implies that multiple estimations should be related to the same input image. Most existing salient object detection models are deterministic following a point to point estimation learning pipeline, making them incapable to estimate the predictive distribution. Although latent variable model based stochastic prediction network exists to model the prediction variants, the latent space based on the single clean saliency annotation is less reliable in exploring the subjective nature of saliency, leading to less effective saliency "divergence modeling". Given multiple saliency annotations, we introduce a general divergence modeling strategy via random sampling, and apply our strategy to an ensemble based framework and three latent variable model based solutions. Experimental results indicate that our general divergence modeling strategy works superiorly in exploring the subjective nature of saliency.

Transformer Transforms Salient Object Detection and Camouflaged Object Detection

The transformer networks, which originate from machine translation, are particularly good at modeling long-range dependencies within a long sequence. Currently, the transformer networks are making revolutionary progress in various vision tasks ranging from high-level classification tasks to low-level dense prediction tasks. In this paper, we conduct research on applying the transformer networks for salient object detection (SOD). Specifically, we adopt the dense transformer backbone for fully supervised RGB image based SOD, RGB-D image pair based SOD, and weakly supervised SOD via scribble supervision. As an extension, we also apply our fully supervised model to the task of camouflaged object detection (COD) for camouflaged object segmentation. For the fully supervised models, we define the dense transformer backbone as feature encoder, and design a very simple decoder to produce a one channel saliency map (or camouflage map for the COD task). For the weakly supervised model, as there exists no structure information in the scribble annotation, we first adopt the recent proposed Gated-CRF loss to effectively model the pair-wise relationships for accurate model prediction. Then, we introduce self-supervised learning strategy to push the model to produce scale-invariant predictions, which is proven effective for weakly supervised models and models trained on small training datasets. Extensive experimental results on various SOD and COD tasks (fully supervised RGB image based SOD, fully supervised RGB-D image pair based SOD, weakly supervised SOD via scribble supervision, and fully supervised RGB image based COD) illustrate that transformer networks can transform salient object detection and camouflaged object detection, leading to new benchmarks for each related task.