QMNet: Importance-Aware Message Exchange for Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

To improve the performance of multi-agent reinforcement learning under the constraint of wireless resources, we propose a message importance metric and design an importance-aware scheduling policy to effectively exchange messages. The key insight is spending the precious communication resources on important messages. The message importance depends not only on the messages themselves, but also on the needs of agents who receive them. Accordingly, we propose a query-message-based architecture, called QMNet. Agents generate queries and messages with the environment observation. Sharing queries can help calculate message importance. Exchanging messages can help agents cooperate better. Besides, we exploit the message importance to deal with random access collisions in decentralized systems. Furthermore, a message prediction mechanism is proposed to compensate for messages that are not transmitted. Finally, we evaluate the proposed schemes in a traffic junction environment, where only a fraction of agents can send messages due to limited wireless resources. Results show that QMNet can extract valuable information to guarantee the system performance even when only $30\%$ of agents can share messages. By exploiting message prediction, the system can further save $40\%$ of wireless resources. The importance-aware decentralized multi-access mechanism can effectively avoid collisions, achieving almost the same performance as centralized scheduling.

Dynamic Compression Ratio Selection for Edge Inference Systems with Hard Deadlines

Implementing machine learning algorithms on Internet of things (IoT) devices has become essential for emerging applications, such as autonomous driving, environment monitoring. But the limitations of computation capability and energy consumption make it difficult to run complex machine learning algorithms on IoT devices, especially when latency deadline exists. One solution is to offload the computation intensive tasks to the edge server. However, the wireless uploading of the raw data is time consuming and may lead to deadline violation. To reduce the communication cost, lossy data compression can be exploited for inference tasks, but may bring more erroneous inference results. In this paper, we propose a dynamic compression ratio selection scheme for edge inference system with hard deadlines. The key idea is to balance the tradeoff between communication cost and inference accuracy. By dynamically selecting the optimal compression ratio with the remaining deadline budgets for queued tasks, more tasks can be timely completed with correct inference under limited communication resources. Furthermore, information augmentation that retransmits less compressed data of task with erroneous inference, is proposed to enhance the accuracy performance. While it is often hard to know the correctness of inference, we use uncertainty to estimate the confidence of the inference, and based on that, jointly optimize the information augmentation and compression ratio selection. Lastly, considering the wireless transmission errors, we further design a retransmission scheme to reduce performance degradation due to packet losses. Simulation results show the performance of the proposed schemes under different deadlines and task arrival rates.

Video to Fully Automatic 3D Hair Model

Imagine taking a selfie video with your mobile phone and getting as output a 3D model of your head (face and 3D hair strands) that can be later used in VR, AR, and any other domain. State of the art hair reconstruction methods allow either a single photo (thus compromising 3D quality) or multiple views, but they require manual user interaction (manual hair segmentation and capture of fixed camera views that span full 360 degree). In this paper, we describe a system that can completely automatically create a reconstruction from any video (even a selfie video), and we don't require specific views, since taking your -90 degree, 90 degree, and full back views is not feasible in a selfie capture. In the core of our system, in addition to the automatization components, hair strands are estimated and deformed in 3D (rather than 2D as in state of the art) thus enabling superior results. We provide qualitative, quantitative, and Mechanical Turk human studies that support the proposed system, and show results on a diverse variety of videos (8 different celebrity videos, 9 selfie mobile videos, spanning age, gender, hair length, type, and styling).