CARMA: Context-Aware Runtime Reconfiguration for Energy-Efficient Sensor Fusion

Autonomous systems (AS) are systems that can adapt and change their behavior in response to unanticipated events and include systems such as aerial drones, autonomous vehicles, and ground/aquatic robots. AS require a wide array of sensors, deep-learning models, and powerful hardware platforms to perceive and safely operate in real-time. However, in many contexts, some sensing modalities negatively impact perception while increasing the system's overall energy consumption. Since AS are often energy-constrained edge devices, energy-efficient sensor fusion methods have been proposed. However, existing methods either fail to adapt to changing scenario conditions or to optimize energy efficiency system-wide. We propose CARMA: a context-aware sensor fusion approach that uses context to dynamically reconfigure the computation flow on a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) at runtime. By clock-gating unused sensors and model sub-components, CARMA significantly reduces the energy used by a multi-sensory object detector without compromising performance. We use a Deep-learning Processor Unit (DPU) based reconfiguration approach to minimize the latency of model reconfiguration. We evaluate multiple context-identification strategies, propose a novel system-wide energy-performance joint optimization, and evaluate scenario-specific perception performance. Across challenging real-world sensing contexts, CARMA outperforms state-of-the-art methods with up to 1.3x speedup and 73% lower energy consumption.

SplatFlow: Learning Multi-frame Optical Flow via Splatting

Occlusion problem remains a key challenge in Optical Flow Estimation (OFE) despite the recent significant progress brought by deep learning in the field. Most existing deep learning OFE methods, especially those based on two frames, cannot properly handle occlusions, in part because there is no significant feature similarity in occluded regions. The multi-frame settings have the potential to mitigate the occlusion issue in OFE. However, the problem of Multi-frame OFE (MOFE) remains underexplored, and the limited works are specially designed for pyramid backbones and obtain the aligned temporal information by time-consuming backward flow calculation or non-differentiable forward warping transformation. To address these shortcomings, we propose an efficient MOFE framework named SplatFlow, which is realized by introducing the differentiable splatting transformation to align the temporal information, designing a One-to-Many embedding method to densely guide the current frame's estimation, and further remodelling the existing two-frame backbones. The proposed SplatFlow is very efficient yet more accurate as it is able to handle occlusions properly. Extensive experimental evaluations show that our SplatFlow substantially outperforms all published methods on KITTI2015 and Sintel benchmarks. Especially on Sintel benchmark, SplatFlow achieves errors of 1.12 (clean pass) and 2.07 (final pass), with surprisingly significant 19.4% and 16.2% error reductions from the previous best results submitted, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/wwsource/SplatFlow.

TOFG: A Unified and Fine-Grained Environment Representation in Autonomous Driving

In autonomous driving, an accurate understanding of environment, e.g., the vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-lane interactions, plays a critical role in many driving tasks such as trajectory prediction and motion planning. Environment information comes from high-definition (HD) map and historical trajectories of vehicles. Due to the heterogeneity of the map data and trajectory data, many data-driven models for trajectory prediction and motion planning extract vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-lane interactions in a separate and sequential manner. However, such a manner may capture biased interpretation of interactions, causing lower prediction and planning accuracy. Moreover, separate extraction leads to a complicated model structure and hence the overall efficiency and scalability are sacrificed. To address the above issues, we propose an environment representation, Temporal Occupancy Flow Graph (TOFG). Specifically, the occupancy flow-based representation unifies the map information and vehicle trajectories into a homogeneous data format and enables a consistent prediction. The temporal dependencies among vehicles can help capture the change of occupancy flow timely to further promote model performance. To demonstrate that TOFG is capable of simplifying the model architecture, we incorporate TOFG with a simple graph attention (GAT) based neural network and propose TOFG-GAT, which can be used for both trajectory prediction and motion planning. Experiment results show that TOFG-GAT achieves better or competitive performance than all the SOTA baselines with less training time.

Kernel-SSL: Kernel KL Divergence for Self-Supervised Learning

Contrastive learning usually compares one positive anchor sample with lots of negative samples to perform Self-Supervised Learning (SSL). Alternatively, non-contrastive learning, as exemplified by methods like BYOL, SimSiam, and Barlow Twins, accomplishes SSL without the explicit use of negative samples. Inspired by the existing analysis for contrastive learning, we provide a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) understanding of many existing non-contrastive learning methods. Subsequently, we propose a novel loss function, Kernel-SSL, which directly optimizes the mean embedding and the covariance operator within the RKHS. In experiments, our method Kernel-SSL outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on ImageNet datasets under the linear evaluation settings. Specifically, when performing 100 epochs pre-training, our method outperforms SimCLR by 4.6%.

Imbalance-Agnostic Source-Free Domain Adaptation via Avatar Prototype Alignment

Source-free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (SF-UDA) aims to adapt a well-trained source model to an unlabeled target domain without access to the source data. One key challenge is the lack of source data during domain adaptation. To handle this, we propose to mine the hidden knowledge of the source model and exploit it to generate source avatar prototypes. To this end, we propose a Contrastive Prototype Generation and Adaptation (CPGA) method. CPGA consists of two stages: Prototype generation and Prototype adaptation. Extensive experiments on three UDA benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of CPGA. However, existing SF.UDA studies implicitly assume balanced class distributions for both the source and target domains, which hinders their real applications. To address this issue, we study a more practical SF-UDA task, termed imbalance-agnostic SF-UDA, where the class distributions of both the unseen source domain and unlabeled target domain are unknown and could be arbitrarily skewed. This task is much more challenging than vanilla SF-UDA due to the co-occurrence of covariate shifts and unidentified class distribution shifts between the source and target domains. To address this task, we extend CPGA and propose a new Target-aware Contrastive Prototype Generation and Adaptation (T-CPGA) method. Specifically, for better prototype adaptation in the imbalance-agnostic scenario, T-CPGA applies a new pseudo label generation strategy to identify unknown target class distribution and generate accurate pseudo labels, by utilizing the collective intelligence of the source model and an additional contrastive language-image pre-trained model. Meanwhile, we further devise a target label-distribution-aware classifier to adapt the model to the unknown target class distribution. We empirically show that T-CPGA significantly outperforms CPGA and other SF-UDA methods in imbalance-agnostic SF-UDA.

RelationMatch: Matching In-batch Relationships for Semi-supervised Learning

Semi-supervised learning has achieved notable success by leveraging very few labeled data and exploiting the wealth of information derived from unlabeled data. However, existing algorithms usually focus on aligning predictions on paired data points augmented from an identical source, and overlook the inter-point relationships within each batch. This paper introduces a novel method, RelationMatch, which exploits in-batch relationships with a matrix cross-entropy (MCE) loss function. Through the application of MCE, our proposed method consistently surpasses the performance of established state-of-the-art methods, such as FixMatch and FlexMatch, across a variety of vision datasets. Notably, we observed a substantial enhancement of 15.21% in accuracy over FlexMatch on the STL-10 dataset using only 40 labels. Moreover, we apply MCE to supervised learning scenarios, and observe consistent improvements as well.

Model-Contrastive Federated Domain Adaptation

Federated domain adaptation (FDA) aims to collaboratively transfer knowledge from source clients (domains) to the related but different target client, without communicating the local data of any client. Moreover, the source clients have different data distributions, leading to extremely challenging in knowledge transfer. Despite the recent progress in FDA, we empirically find that existing methods can not leverage models of heterogeneous domains and thus they fail to achieve excellent performance. In this paper, we propose a model-based method named FDAC, aiming to address {\bf F}ederated {\bf D}omain {\bf A}daptation based on {\bf C}ontrastive learning and Vision Transformer (ViT). In particular, contrastive learning can leverage the unlabeled data to train excellent models and the ViT architecture performs better than convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in extracting adaptable features. To the best of our knowledge, FDAC is the first attempt to learn transferable representations by manipulating the latent architecture of ViT under the federated setting. Furthermore, FDAC can increase the target data diversity by compensating from each source model with insufficient knowledge of samples and features, based on domain augmentation and semantic matching. Extensive experiments on several real datasets demonstrate that FDAC outperforms all the comparative methods in most conditions. Moreover, FDCA can also improve communication efficiency which is another key factor in the federated setting.

SEAL: Simultaneous Label Hierarchy Exploration And Learning

Label hierarchy is an important source of external knowledge that can enhance classification performance. However, most existing methods rely on predefined label hierarchies that may not match the data distribution. To address this issue, we propose Simultaneous label hierarchy Exploration And Learning (SEAL), a new framework that explores the label hierarchy by augmenting the observed labels with latent labels that follow a prior hierarchical structure. Our approach uses a 1-Wasserstein metric over the tree metric space as an objective function, which enables us to simultaneously learn a data-driven label hierarchy and perform (semi-)supervised learning. We evaluate our method on several datasets and show that it achieves superior results in both supervised and semi-supervised scenarios and reveals insightful label structures. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/tzq1999/SEAL.

Disentangling Writer and Character Styles for Handwriting Generation

Training machines to synthesize diverse handwritings is an intriguing task. Recently, RNN-based methods have been proposed to generate stylized online Chinese characters. However, these methods mainly focus on capturing a person's overall writing style, neglecting subtle style inconsistencies between characters written by the same person. For example, while a person's handwriting typically exhibits general uniformity (e.g., glyph slant and aspect ratios), there are still small style variations in finer details (e.g., stroke length and curvature) of characters. In light of this, we propose to disentangle the style representations at both writer and character levels from individual handwritings to synthesize realistic stylized online handwritten characters. Specifically, we present the style-disentangled Transformer (SDT), which employs two complementary contrastive objectives to extract the style commonalities of reference samples and capture the detailed style patterns of each sample, respectively. Extensive experiments on various language scripts demonstrate the effectiveness of SDT. Notably, our empirical findings reveal that the two learned style representations provide information at different frequency magnitudes, underscoring the importance of separate style extraction. Our source code is public at: https://github.com/dailenson/SDT.

Contrastive Learning Is Spectral Clustering On Similarity Graph

Contrastive learning is a powerful self-supervised learning method, but we have a limited theoretical understanding of how it works and why it works. In this paper, we prove that contrastive learning with the standard InfoNCE loss is equivalent to spectral clustering on the similarity graph. Using this equivalence as the building block, we extend our analysis to the CLIP model and rigorously characterize how similar multi-modal objects are embedded together. Motivated by our theoretical insights, we introduce the kernel mixture loss, incorporating novel kernel functions that outperform the standard Gaussian kernel on several vision datasets.