Learning-based trajectory prediction models have encountered great success, with the promise of leveraging contextual information in addition to motion history. Yet, we find that state-of-the-art forecasting methods tend to overly rely on the agent's dynamics, failing to exploit the semantic cues provided at its input. To alleviate this issue, we introduce CAB, a motion forecasting model equipped with a training procedure designed to promote the use of semantic contextual information. We also introduce two novel metrics -- dispersion and convergence-to-range -- to measure the temporal consistency of successive forecasts, which we found missing in standard metrics. Our method is evaluated on the widely adopted nuScenes Prediction benchmark.
Conversation question answering requires the ability to interpret a question correctly. Current models, however, are still unsatisfactory due to the difficulty of understanding the co-references and ellipsis in daily conversation. Even though generative approaches achieved remarkable progress, they are still trapped by semantic incompleteness. This paper presents an action-based approach to recover the complete expression of the question. Specifically, we first locate the positions of co-reference or ellipsis in the question while assigning the corresponding action to each candidate span. We then look for matching phrases related to the candidate clues in the conversation context. Finally, according to the predicted action, we decide whether to replace the co-reference or supplement the ellipsis with the matched information. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on both English and Chinese utterance rewrite tasks, improving the state-of-the-art EM (exact match) by 3.9\% and ROUGE-L by 1.0\% respectively on the Restoration-200K dataset.
Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) aims to learn object localizer solely by using image-level labels. The convolution neural network (CNN) based techniques often result in highlighting the most discriminative part of objects while ignoring the entire object extent. Recently, the transformer architecture has been deployed to WSOL to capture the long-range feature dependencies with self-attention mechanism and multilayer perceptron structure. Nevertheless, transformers lack the locality inductive bias inherent to CNNs and therefore may deteriorate local feature details in WSOL. In this paper, we propose a novel framework built upon the transformer, termed LCTR (Local Continuity TRansformer), which targets at enhancing the local perception capability of global features among long-range feature dependencies. To this end, we propose a relational patch-attention module (RPAM), which considers cross-patch information on a global basis. We further design a cue digging module (CDM), which utilizes local features to guide the learning trend of the model for highlighting the weak local responses. Finally, comprehensive experiments are carried out on two widely used datasets, ie, CUB-200-2011 and ILSVRC, to verify the effectiveness of our method.
Identity transfer often faces the challenge of generalizing to new situations where large pose and expression or background gaps exist between source and target face images. To improve generalization in such situations, biases take a key role~\cite{mitchell_1980_bias}. This paper proposes an Errors-in-Variables Adapter (EVA) model to induce learning of proper generalizations by explicitly employing biases to identity estimation based on prior knowledge about the target situation. To better match the source face with the target situation in terms of pose, expression, and background factors, we model the bias as a causal effect of the target situation on source identity and estimate this effect through a controlled intervention trial. To achieve smoother transfer for the target face across the identity gap, we eliminate the target face specificity through multiple kernel regressions. The kernels are used to constrain the regressions to operate only on identity information in the internal representations of the target image, while leaving other perceptual information invariant. Combining these post-regression representations with the biased estimation for identity, EVA shows impressive performance even in the presence of large gaps, providing empirical evidence supporting the utility of the inductive biases in identity estimation.
This report discusses the results of SBIR Phase I effort to prove the feasibility of dramatic improvement of the microbolometer-based Long Wave Infrared (LWIR) detectors sensitivity, especially for the 3D measurements. The resulting low SWaP-C thermal depth-sensing system will enable the situational awareness of Autonomous Air Vehicles for Advanced Air Mobility (AAM). It will provide robust 3D information of the surrounding environment, including low-contrast static and moving objects, at far distances in degraded visual conditions and GPS-denied areas. Our multi-sensor 3D perception enabled by COTS uncooled thermal sensors mitigates major weakness of LWIR sensors - low contrast by increasing the system sensitivity over an order of magnitude. There were no available thermal image sets suitable for evaluating this technology, making datasets acquisition our first goal. We discuss the design and construction of the prototype system with sixteen 640pix x 512pix LWIR detectors, camera calibration to subpixel resolution, capture, and process synchronized image. The results show the 3.84x contrast increase for intrascene-only data and an additional 5.5x - with the interscene accumulation, reaching system noise-equivalent temperature difference (NETD) of 1.9 mK with the 40 mK sensors.
Risk classification plays an important role in many regulations and standards. However, a general method that provides an optimal classification has not been proposed yet. Also, the criteria of optimality are not defined in these regulations. In this work, we will propose a mathematical model that is sufficient to describe this problem, and we also propose an algorithm that classifies graph vertices based on their risk value in polynomial time.
Ultrasonic imaging is being used to obtain information about the acoustic properties of a medium by emitting waves into it and recording their interaction using ultrasonic transducer arrays. The Delay-And-Sum (DAS) algorithm forms images using the main path on which reflected signals travel back to the transducers. In some applications, different insonification paths can be considered, for instance by placing the transducers at different locations or if strong reflectors inside the medium are known a-priori. These different modes give rise to multiple DAS images reflecting different geometric information about the scatterers and the challenge is to either fuse them into one image or to directly extract higher-level information regarding the materials of the medium, e.g., a segmentation map. Traditional image fusion techniques typically use ad-hoc combinations of pre-defined image transforms, pooling operations and thresholding. In this work, we propose a deep neural network (DNN) architecture that directly maps all available data to a segmentation map while explicitly incorporating the DAS image formation for the different insonification paths as network layers. This enables information flow between data pre-processing and image post-processing DNNs, trained end-to-end. We compare our proposed method to a traditional image fusion technique using simulated data experiments, mimicking a non-destructive testing application with four image modes, i.e., two transducer locations and two internal reflection boundaries. Using our approach, it is possible to obtain much more accurate segmentation of defects.
Traffic sign detection is a challenging task for the unmanned driving system, especially for the detection of multi-scale targets and the real-time problem of detection. In the traffic sign detection process, the scale of the targets changes greatly, which will have a certain impact on the detection accuracy. Feature pyramid is widely used to solve this problem but it might break the feature consistency across different scales of traffic signs. Moreover, in practical application, it is difficult for common methods to improve the detection accuracy of multi-scale traffic signs while ensuring real-time detection. In this paper, we propose an improved feature pyramid model, named AF-FPN, which utilizes the adaptive attention module (AAM) and feature enhancement module (FEM) to reduce the information loss in the process of feature map generation and enhance the representation ability of the feature pyramid. We replaced the original feature pyramid network in YOLOv5 with AF-FPN, which improves the detection performance for multi-scale targets of the YOLOv5 network under the premise of ensuring real-time detection. Furthermore, a new automatic learning data augmentation method is proposed to enrich the dataset and improve the robustness of the model to make it more suitable for practical scenarios. Extensive experimental results on the Tsinghua-Tencent 100K (TT100K) dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method when compared with several state-of-the-art methods.
When mining large datasets in order to predict new data, limitations of the principles behind statistical machine learning pose a serious challenge not only to the Big Data deluge, but also to the traditional assumptions that data generating processes are biased toward low algorithmic complexity. Even when one assumes an underlying algorithmic-informational bias toward simplicity in finite dataset generators, we show that fully automated, with or without access to pseudo-random generators, computable learning algorithms, in particular those of statistical nature used in current approaches to machine learning (including deep learning), can always be deceived, naturally or artificially, by sufficiently large datasets. In particular, we demonstrate that, for every finite learning algorithm, there is a sufficiently large dataset size above which the algorithmic probability of an unpredictable deceiver is an upper bound (up to a multiplicative constant that only depends on the learning algorithm) for the algorithmic probability of any other larger dataset. In other words, very large and complex datasets are as likely to deceive learning algorithms into a "simplicity bubble" as any other particular dataset. These deceiving datasets guarantee that any prediction will diverge from the high-algorithmic-complexity globally optimal solution while converging toward the low-algorithmic-complexity locally optimal solution. We discuss the framework and empirical conditions for circumventing this deceptive phenomenon, moving away from statistical machine learning towards a stronger type of machine learning based on, or motivated by, the intrinsic power of algorithmic information theory and computability theory.
Image inpainting aims at restoring missing region of corrupted images, which has many applications such as image restoration and object removal. However, current GAN-based inpainting models fail to explicitly consider the semantic consistency between restored images and original images. Forexample, given a male image with image region of one eye missing, current models may restore it with a female eye. This is due to the ambiguity of GAN-based inpainting models: these models can generate many possible restorations given a missing region. To address this limitation, our key insight is that semantically interpretable information (such as attribute and segmentation information) of input images (with missing regions) can provide essential guidance for the inpainting process. Based on this insight, we propose a boosted GAN with semantically interpretable information for image inpainting that consists of an inpainting network and a discriminative network. The inpainting network utilizes two auxiliary pretrained networks to discover the attribute and segmentation information of input images and incorporates them into the inpainting process to provide explicit semantic-level guidance. The discriminative network adopts a multi-level design that can enforce regularizations not only on overall realness but also on attribute and segmentation consistency with the original images. Experimental results show that our proposed model can preserve consistency on both attribute and segmentation level, and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models.