When are Foundation Models Effective? Understanding the Suitability for Pixel-Level Classification Using Multispectral Imagery

Foundation models, i.e., very large deep learning models, have demonstrated impressive performances in various language and vision tasks that are otherwise difficult to reach using smaller-size models. The major success of GPT-type of language models is particularly exciting and raises expectations on the potential of foundation models in other domains including satellite remote sensing. In this context, great efforts have been made to build foundation models to test their capabilities in broader applications, and examples include Prithvi by NASA-IBM, Segment-Anything-Model, ViT, etc. This leads to an important question: Are foundation models always a suitable choice for different remote sensing tasks, and when or when not? This work aims to enhance the understanding of the status and suitability of foundation models for pixel-level classification using multispectral imagery at moderate resolution, through comparisons with traditional machine learning (ML) and regular-size deep learning models. Interestingly, the results reveal that in many scenarios traditional ML models still have similar or better performance compared to foundation models, especially for tasks where texture is less useful for classification. On the other hand, deep learning models did show more promising results for tasks where labels partially depend on texture (e.g., burn scar), while the difference in performance between foundation models and deep learning models is not obvious. The results conform with our analysis: The suitability of foundation models depend on the alignment between the self-supervised learning tasks and the real downstream tasks, and the typical masked autoencoder paradigm is not necessarily suitable for many remote sensing problems.

Existence Is Chaos: Enhancing 3D Human Motion Prediction with Uncertainty Consideration

Human motion prediction is consisting in forecasting future body poses from historically observed sequences. It is a longstanding challenge due to motion's complex dynamics and uncertainty. Existing methods focus on building up complicated neural networks to model the motion dynamics. The predicted results are required to be strictly similar to the training samples with L2 loss in current training pipeline. However, little attention has been paid to the uncertainty property which is crucial to the prediction task. We argue that the recorded motion in training data could be an observation of possible future, rather than a predetermined result. In addition, existing works calculate the predicted error on each future frame equally during training, while recent work indicated that different frames could play different roles. In this work, a novel computationally efficient encoder-decoder model with uncertainty consideration is proposed, which could learn proper characteristics for future frames by a dynamic function. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our uncertainty consideration approach has obvious advantages both in quantity and quality. Moreover, the proposed method could produce motion sequences with much better quality that avoids the intractable shaking artefacts. We believe our work could provide a novel perspective to consider the uncertainty quality for the general motion prediction task and encourage the studies in this field. The code will be available in https://github.com/Motionpre/Adaptive-Salient-Loss-SAGGB.

SimFair: Physics-Guided Fairness-Aware Learning with Simulation Models

Fairness-awareness has emerged as an essential building block for the responsible use of artificial intelligence in real applications. In many cases, inequity in performance is due to the change in distribution over different regions. While techniques have been developed to improve the transferability of fairness, a solution to the problem is not always feasible with no samples from the new regions, which is a bottleneck for pure data-driven attempts. Fortunately, physics-based mechanistic models have been studied for many problems with major social impacts. We propose SimFair, a physics-guided fairness-aware learning framework, which bridges the data limitation by integrating physical-rule-based simulation and inverse modeling into the training design. Using temperature prediction as an example, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SimFair in fairness preservation.

The Road to On-board Change Detection: A Lightweight Patch-Level Change Detection Network via Exploring the Potential of Pruning and Pooling

Existing satellite remote sensing change detection (CD) methods often crop original large-scale bi-temporal image pairs into small patch pairs and then use pixel-level CD methods to fairly process all the patch pairs. However, due to the sparsity of change in large-scale satellite remote sensing images, existing pixel-level CD methods suffer from a waste of computational cost and memory resources on lots of unchanged areas, which reduces the processing efficiency of on-board platform with extremely limited computation and memory resources. To address this issue, we propose a lightweight patch-level CD network (LPCDNet) to rapidly remove lots of unchanged patch pairs in large-scale bi-temporal image pairs. This is helpful to accelerate the subsequent pixel-level CD processing stage and reduce its memory costs. In our LPCDNet, a sensitivity-guided channel pruning method is proposed to remove unimportant channels and construct the lightweight backbone network on basis of ResNet18 network. Then, the multi-layer feature compression (MLFC) module is designed to compress and fuse the multi-level feature information of bi-temporal image patch. The output of MLFC module is fed into the fully-connected decision network to generate the predicted binary label. Finally, a weighted cross-entropy loss is utilized in the training process of network to tackle the change/unchange class imbalance problem. Experiments on two CD datasets demonstrate that our LPCDNet achieves more than 1000 frames per second on an edge computation platform, i.e., NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin, which is more than 3 times that of the existing methods without noticeable CD performance loss. In addition, our method reduces more than 60% memory costs of the subsequent pixel-level CD processing stage.

Multi-object Detection, Tracking and Prediction in Rugged Dynamic Environments

Multi-object tracking (MOT) has important applications in monitoring, logistics, and other fields. This paper develops a real-time multi-object tracking and prediction system in rugged environments. A 3D object detection algorithm based on Lidar-camera fusion is designed to detect the target objects. Based on the Hungarian algorithm, this paper designs a 3D multi-object tracking algorithm with an adaptive threshold to realize the stable matching and tracking of the objects. We combine Memory Augmented Neural Networks (MANN) and Kalman filter to achieve 3D trajectory prediction on rugged terrains. Besides, we realize a new dynamic SLAM by using the results of multi-object tracking to remove dynamic points for better SLAM performance and static map. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed multi-object tracking and prediction system, several simulations and physical experiments are conducted. The results show that the proposed system can track dynamic objects and provide future trajectory and a more clean static map in real-time.

A Sequence-to-Sequence&Set Model for Text-to-Table Generation

Recently, the text-to-table generation task has attracted increasing attention due to its wide applications. In this aspect, the dominant model formalizes this task as a sequence-to-sequence generation task and serializes each table into a token sequence during training by concatenating all rows in a top-down order. However, it suffers from two serious defects: 1) the predefined order introduces a wrong bias during training, which highly penalizes shifts in the order between rows; 2) the error propagation problem becomes serious when the model outputs a long token sequence. In this paper, we first conduct a preliminary study to demonstrate the generation of most rows is order-insensitive. Furthermore, we propose a novel sequence-to-sequence&set text-to-table generation model. Specifically, in addition to a text encoder encoding the input text, our model is equipped with a table header generator to first output a table header, i.e., the first row of the table, in the manner of sequence generation. Then we use a table body generator with learnable row embeddings and column embeddings to generate a set of table body rows in parallel. Particularly, to deal with the issue that there is no correspondence between each generated table body row and target during training, we propose a target assignment strategy based on the bipartite matching between the first cells of generated table body rows and targets. Experiment results show that our model significantly surpasses the baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance on commonly-used datasets.

Revisiting Non-Autoregressive Translation at Scale

In real-world systems, scaling has been critical for improving the translation quality in autoregressive translation (AT), which however has not been well studied for non-autoregressive translation (NAT). In this work, we bridge the gap by systematically studying the impact of scaling on NAT behaviors. Extensive experiments on six WMT benchmarks over two advanced NAT models show that scaling can alleviate the commonly-cited weaknesses of NAT models, resulting in better translation performance. To reduce the side-effect of scaling on decoding speed, we empirically investigate the impact of NAT encoder and decoder on the translation performance. Experimental results on the large-scale WMT20 En-De show that the asymmetric architecture (e.g. bigger encoder and smaller decoder) can achieve comparable performance with the scaling model, while maintaining the superiority of decoding speed with standard NAT models. To this end, we establish a new benchmark by validating scaled NAT models on the scaled dataset, which can be regarded as a strong baseline for future works. We release code, models and system outputs at https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/Scaling4NAT.

Learning to Detect Noisy Labels Using Model-Based Features

Label noise is ubiquitous in various machine learning scenarios such as self-labeling with model predictions and erroneous data annotation. Many existing approaches are based on heuristics such as sample losses, which might not be flexible enough to achieve optimal solutions. Meta learning based methods address this issue by learning a data selection function, but can be hard to optimize. In light of these pros and cons, we propose Selection-Enhanced Noisy label Training (SENT) that does not rely on meta learning while having the flexibility of being data-driven. SENT transfers the noise distribution to a clean set and trains a model to distinguish noisy labels from clean ones using model-based features. Empirically, on a wide range of tasks including text classification and speech recognition, SENT improves performance over strong baselines under the settings of self-training and label corruption.

Active View Planning for Visual SLAM in Outdoor Environments Based on Continuous Information Modeling

The visual simultaneous localization and mapping(vSLAM) is widely used in GPS-denied and open field environments for ground and surface robots. However, due to the frequent perception failures derived from lacking visual texture or the {swing} of robot view direction on rough terrains, the accuracy and robustness of vSLAM are still to be enhanced. The study develops a novel view planning approach of actively perceiving areas with maximal information to address the mentioned problem; a gimbal camera is used as the main sensor. Firstly, a map representation based on feature distribution-weighted Fisher information is proposed to completely and effectively represent environmental information richness. With the map representation, a continuous environmental information model is further established to convert the discrete information space into a continuous one for numerical optimization in real-time. Subsequently, the receding horizon optimization is utilized to obtain the optimal informative viewpoints with simultaneously considering the robotic perception, exploration and motion cost based on the continuous environmental model. Finally, several simulations and outdoor experiments are performed to verify the improvement of localization robustness and accuracy by the proposed approach.