CELLmap: Enhancing LiDAR SLAM through Elastic and Lightweight Spherical Map Representation

SLAM is a fundamental capability of unmanned systems, with LiDAR-based SLAM gaining widespread adoption due to its high precision. Current SLAM systems can achieve centimeter-level accuracy within a short period. However, there are still several challenges when dealing with largescale mapping tasks including significant storage requirements and difficulty of reusing the constructed maps. To address this, we first design an elastic and lightweight map representation called CELLmap, composed of several CELLs, each representing the local map at the corresponding location. Then, we design a general backend including CELL-based bidirectional registration module and loop closure detection module to improve global map consistency. Our experiments have demonstrated that CELLmap can represent the precise geometric structure of large-scale maps of KITTI dataset using only about 60 MB. Additionally, our general backend achieves up to a 26.88% improvement over various LiDAR odometry methods.

USTC-TD: A Test Dataset and Benchmark for Image and Video Coding in 2020s

Image/video coding has been a remarkable research area for both academia and industry for many years. Testing datasets, especially high-quality image/video datasets are desirable for the justified evaluation of coding-related research, practical applications, and standardization activities. We put forward a test dataset namely USTC-TD, which has been successfully adopted in the practical end-to-end image/video coding challenge of the IEEE International Conference on Visual Communications and Image Processing in 2022 and 2023. USTC-TD contains 40 images at 4K spatial resolution and 10 video sequences at 1080p spatial resolution, featuring various content due to the diverse environmental factors (scene type, texture, motion, view) and the designed imaging factors (illumination, shadow, lens). We quantitatively evaluate USTC-TD on different image/video features (spatial, temporal, color, lightness), and compare it with the previous image/video test datasets, which verifies the wider coverage and more diversity of the proposed dataset. We also evaluate both classic standardized and recent learned image/video coding schemes on USTC-TD with PSNR and MS-SSIM, and provide an extensive benchmark for the evaluated schemes. Based on the characteristics and specific design of the proposed test dataset, we analyze the benchmark performance and shed light on the future research and development of image/video coding. All the data are released online: https://esakak.github.io/USTC-TD.

Efficient Polarization Demosaicking via Low-cost Edge-aware and Inter-channel Correlation

Efficient and high-fidelity polarization demosaicking is critical for industrial applications of the division of focal plane (DoFP) polarization imaging systems. However, existing methods have an unsatisfactory balance of speed, accuracy, and complexity. This study introduces a novel polarization demosaicking algorithm that interpolates within a three-stage basic demosaicking framework to obtain DoFP images. Our method incorporates a DoFP low-cost edge-aware technique (DLE) to guide the interpolation process. Furthermore, the inter-channel correlation is used to calibrate the initial estimate in the polarization difference domain. The proposed algorithm is available in both a lightweight and a full version, tailored to different application requirements. Experiments on simulated and real DoFP images demonstrate that our two methods have the highest interpolation accuracy and speed, respectively, and significantly enhance the visuals. Both versions efficiently process a 1024*1024 image on an AMD Ryzen 5600X CPU in 0.1402s and 0.2693s, respectively. Additionally, since our methods only involve computational processes within a 5*5 window, the potential for parallel acceleration on GPUs or FPGAs is highly feasible.

TART: Boosting Clean Accuracy Through Tangent Direction Guided Adversarial Training

Adversarial training has been shown to be successful in enhancing the robustness of deep neural networks against adversarial attacks. However, this robustness is accompanied by a significant decline in accuracy on clean data. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called Tangent Direction Guided Adversarial Training (TART), that leverages the tangent space of the data manifold to ameliorate the existing adversarial defense algorithms. We argue that training with adversarial examples having large normal components significantly alters the decision boundary and hurts accuracy. TART mitigates this issue by estimating the tangent direction of adversarial examples and allocating an adaptive perturbation limit according to the norm of their tangential component. To the best of our knowledge, our paper is the first work to consider the concept of tangent space and direction in the context of adversarial defense. We validate the effectiveness of TART through extensive experiments on both simulated and benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that TART consistently boosts clean accuracy while retaining a high level of robustness against adversarial attacks. Our findings suggest that incorporating the geometric properties of data can lead to more effective and efficient adversarial training methods.

Biased Dueling Bandits with Stochastic Delayed Feedback

The dueling bandit problem, an essential variation of the traditional multi-armed bandit problem, has become significantly prominent recently due to its broad applications in online advertising, recommendation systems, information retrieval, and more. However, in many real-world applications, the feedback for actions is often subject to unavoidable delays and is not immediately available to the agent. This partially observable issue poses a significant challenge to existing dueling bandit literature, as it significantly affects how quickly and accurately the agent can update their policy on the fly. In this paper, we introduce and examine the biased dueling bandit problem with stochastic delayed feedback, revealing that this new practical problem will delve into a more realistic and intriguing scenario involving a preference bias between the selections. We present two algorithms designed to handle situations involving delay. Our first algorithm, requiring complete delay distribution information, achieves the optimal regret bound for the dueling bandit problem when there is no delay. The second algorithm is tailored for situations where the distribution is unknown, but only the expected value of delay is available. We provide a comprehensive regret analysis for the two proposed algorithms and then evaluate their empirical performance on both synthetic and real datasets.

RayFormer: Improving Query-Based Multi-Camera 3D Object Detection via Ray-Centric Strategies

The recent advances in query-based multi-camera 3D object detection are featured by initializing object queries in the 3D space, and then sampling features from perspective-view images to perform multi-round query refinement. In such a framework, query points near the same camera ray are likely to sample similar features from very close pixels, resulting in ambiguous query features and degraded detection accuracy. To this end, we introduce RayFormer, a camera-ray-inspired query-based 3D object detector that aligns the initialization and feature extraction of object queries with the optical characteristics of cameras. Specifically, RayFormer transforms perspective-view image features into bird's eye view (BEV) via the lift-splat-shoot method and segments the BEV map to sectors based on the camera rays. Object queries are uniformly and sparsely initialized along each camera ray, facilitating the projection of different queries onto different areas in the image to extract distinct features. Besides, we leverage the instance information of images to supplement the uniformly initialized object queries by further involving additional queries along the ray from 2D object detection boxes. To extract unique object-level features that cater to distinct queries, we design a ray sampling method that suitably organizes the distribution of feature sampling points on both images and bird's eye view. Extensive experiments are conducted on the nuScenes dataset to validate our proposed ray-inspired model design. The proposed RayFormer achieves 55.5% mAP and 63.3% NDS, respectively. Our codes will be made available.

SciCode: A Research Coding Benchmark Curated by Scientists

Since language models (LMs) now outperform average humans on many challenging tasks, it has become increasingly difficult to develop challenging, high-quality, and realistic evaluations. We address this issue by examining LMs' capabilities to generate code for solving real scientific research problems. Incorporating input from scientists and AI researchers in 16 diverse natural science sub-fields, including mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and materials science, we created a scientist-curated coding benchmark, SciCode. The problems in SciCode naturally factorize into multiple subproblems, each involving knowledge recall, reasoning, and code synthesis. In total, SciCode contains 338 subproblems decomposed from 80 challenging main problems. It offers optional descriptions specifying useful scientific background information and scientist-annotated gold-standard solutions and test cases for evaluation. Claude3.5-Sonnet, the best-performing model among those tested, can solve only 4.6% of the problems in the most realistic setting. We believe that SciCode demonstrates both contemporary LMs' progress towards becoming helpful scientific assistants and sheds light on the development and evaluation of scientific AI in the future.

Uniformly Accelerated Motion Model for Inter Prediction

Inter prediction is a key technology to reduce the temporal redundancy in video coding. In natural videos, there are usually multiple moving objects with variable velocity, resulting in complex motion fields that are difficult to represent compactly. In Versatile Video Coding (VVC), existing inter prediction methods usually assume uniform speed motion between consecutive frames and use the linear models for motion estimation (ME) and motion compensation (MC), which may not well handle the complex motion fields in the real world. To address these issues, we introduce a uniformly accelerated motion model (UAMM) to exploit motion-related elements (velocity, acceleration) of moving objects between the video frames, and further combine them to assist the inter prediction methods to handle the variable motion in the temporal domain. Specifically, first, the theory of UAMM is mentioned. Second, based on that, we propose the UAMM-based parameter derivation and extrapolation schemes in the coding process. Third, we integrate the UAMM into existing inter prediction modes (Merge, MMVD, CIIP) to achieve higher prediction accuracy. The proposed method is implemented into the VVC reference software, VTM version 12.0. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves up to 0.38% and on average 0.13% BD-rate reduction compared to the VTM anchor, under the Low-delay P configuration, with a slight increase of time complexity on the encoding/decoding side.

Perception Helps Planning: Facilitating Multi-Stage Lane-Level Integration via Double-Edge Structures

When planning for autonomous driving, it is crucial to consider essential traffic elements such as lanes, intersections, traffic regulations, and dynamic agents. However, they are often overlooked by the traditional end-to-end planning methods, likely leading to inefficiencies and non-compliance with traffic regulations. In this work, we endeavor to integrate the perception of these elements into the planning task. To this end, we propose Perception Helps Planning (PHP), a novel framework that reconciles lane-level planning with perception. This integration ensures that planning is inherently aligned with traffic constraints, thus facilitating safe and efficient driving. Specifically, PHP focuses on both edges of a lane for planning and perception purposes, taking into consideration the 3D positions of both lane edges and attributes for lane intersections, lane directions, lane occupancy, and planning. In the algorithmic design, the process begins with the transformer encoding multi-camera images to extract the above features and predicting lane-level perception results. Next, the hierarchical feature early fusion module refines the features for predicting planning attributes. Finally, the double-edge interpreter utilizes a late-fusion process specifically designed to integrate lane-level perception and planning information, culminating in the generation of vehicle control signals. Experiments on three Carla benchmarks show significant improvements in driving score of 27.20%, 33.47%, and 15.54% over existing algorithms, respectively, achieving the state-of-the-art performance, with the system operating up to 22.57 FPS.

In-Loop Filtering via Trained Look-Up Tables

In-loop filtering (ILF) is a key technology for removing the artifacts in image/video coding standards. Recently, neural network-based in-loop filtering methods achieve remarkable coding gains beyond the capability of advanced video coding standards, which becomes a powerful coding tool candidate for future video coding standards. However, the utilization of deep neural networks brings heavy time and computational complexity, and high demands of high-performance hardware, which is challenging to apply to the general uses of coding scene. To address this limitation, inspired by explorations in image restoration, we propose an efficient and practical in-loop filtering scheme by adopting the Look-up Table (LUT). We train the DNN of in-loop filtering within a fixed filtering reference range, and cache the output values of the DNN into a LUT via traversing all possible inputs. At testing time in the coding process, the filtered pixel is generated by locating input pixels (to-be-filtered pixel with reference pixels) and interpolating cached filtered pixel values. To further enable the large filtering reference range with the limited storage cost of LUT, we introduce the enhanced indexing mechanism in the filtering process, and clipping/finetuning mechanism in the training. The proposed method is implemented into the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) reference software, VTM-11.0. Experimental results show that the ultrafast, very fast, and fast mode of the proposed method achieves on average 0.13%/0.34%/0.51%, and 0.10%/0.27%/0.39% BD-rate reduction, under the all intra (AI) and random access (RA) configurations. Especially, our method has friendly time and computational complexity, only 101%/102%-104%/108% time increase with 0.13-0.93 kMACs/pixel, and only 164-1148 KB storage cost for a single model. Our solution may shed light on the journey of practical neural network-based coding tool evolution.