Emergent Communication in Interactive Sketch Question Answering

Vision-based emergent communication (EC) aims to learn to communicate through sketches and demystify the evolution of human communication. Ironically, previous works neglect multi-round interaction, which is indispensable in human communication. To fill this gap, we first introduce a novel Interactive Sketch Question Answering (ISQA) task, where two collaborative players are interacting through sketches to answer a question about an image in a multi-round manner. To accomplish this task, we design a new and efficient interactive EC system, which can achieve an effective balance among three evaluation factors, including the question answering accuracy, drawing complexity and human interpretability. Our experimental results including human evaluation demonstrate that multi-round interactive mechanism facilitates targeted and efficient communication between intelligent agents with decent human interpretability.

Interruption-Aware Cooperative Perception for V2X Communication-Aided Autonomous Driving

Cooperative perception enabled by V2X Communication technologies can significantly improve the perception performance of autonomous vehicles beyond the limited perception ability of the individual vehicles, therefore, improving the safety and efficiency of autonomous driving in intelligent transportation systems. However, in order to fully reap the benefits of cooperative perception in practice, the impacts of imperfect V2X communication, i.e., communication errors and disruptions, need to be understood and effective remedies need to be developed to alleviate their adverse impacts. Motivated by this need, we propose a novel INterruption-aware robust COoperative Perception (V2X-INCOP) solution for V2X communication-aided autonomous driving, which leverages historical information to recover missing information due to interruption. To achieve comprehensive recovery, we design a communication adaptive multi-scale spatial-temporal prediction model to extract multi-scale spatial-temporal features based on V2X communication conditions and capture the most significant information for the prediction of the missing information. To further improve recovery performance, we adopt a knowledge distillation framework to give direct supervision to the prediction model and a curriculum learning strategy to stabilize the training of the model. Our experiments on three public cooperative perception datasets demonstrate that our proposed method is effective in alleviating the impacts of communication interruption on cooperative perception.

Where2comm: Communication-Efficient Collaborative Perception via Spatial Confidence Maps

Multi-agent collaborative perception could significantly upgrade the perception performance by enabling agents to share complementary information with each other through communication. It inevitably results in a fundamental trade-off between perception performance and communication bandwidth. To tackle this bottleneck issue, we propose a spatial confidence map, which reflects the spatial heterogeneity of perceptual information. It empowers agents to only share spatially sparse, yet perceptually critical information, contributing to where to communicate. Based on this novel spatial confidence map, we propose Where2comm, a communication-efficient collaborative perception framework. Where2comm has two distinct advantages: i) it considers pragmatic compression and uses less communication to achieve higher perception performance by focusing on perceptually critical areas; and ii) it can handle varying communication bandwidth by dynamically adjusting spatial areas involved in communication. To evaluate Where2comm, we consider 3D object detection in both real-world and simulation scenarios with two modalities (camera/LiDAR) and two agent types (cars/drones) on four datasets: OPV2V, V2X-Sim, DAIR-V2X, and our original CoPerception-UAVs. Where2comm consistently outperforms previous methods; for example, it achieves more than $100,000 \times$ lower communication volume and still outperforms DiscoNet and V2X-ViT on OPV2V. Our code is available at https://github.com/MediaBrain-SJTU/where2comm.

Latency-Aware Collaborative Perception

Collaborative perception has recently shown great potential to improve perception capabilities over single-agent perception. Existing collaborative perception methods usually consider an ideal communication environment. However, in practice, the communication system inevitably suffers from latency issues, causing potential performance degradation and high risks in safety-critical applications, such as autonomous driving. To mitigate the effect caused by the inevitable latency, from a machine learning perspective, we present the first latency-aware collaborative perception system, which actively adapts asynchronous perceptual features from multiple agents to the same time stamp, promoting the robustness and effectiveness of collaboration. To achieve such a feature-level synchronization, we propose a novel latency compensation module, called SyncNet, which leverages feature-attention symbiotic estimation and time modulation techniques. Experiments results show that the proposed latency aware collaborative perception system with SyncNet can outperforms the state-of-the-art collaborative perception method by 15.6% in the communication latency scenario and keep collaborative perception being superior to single agent perception under severe latency.