Trust snapshot

Quick read

Trust 21 - EmergingVerification L1Unclaimed author
29works
0followers
15topics
4close collaborators

Actions

Decide how to stay connected

Follow researcher0

Identity and collaboration

How to connect with this researcher

Claiming links this public author record to a researcher profile and unlocks direct collaboration workflows.

Log in to claim

Direct collaboration

Open a focused conversation when the fit is right

Claim this author entity first to unlock direct invitations.

Research graph

See the researcher in context

Open full explorer

Inspect adjacent work, topics, institutions and collaborators without jumping out to a separate graph page.

Building this graph slice

BZPEER is loading the nearby papers, people, topics and institutions for this page.

Published work

29 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

PAMNet: Cycle-aware Phase-Amplitude Modulation Network for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Reliable periodic patterns serve as a fundamental basis for accurate multivariate time series forecasting. However, existing methods either implicitly extract periodicity through complex model architectures (e.g., Transformers) with high computational overhead or overlook the intrinsic phase-amplitude coupling when modeling periodic components explicitly. To address these issues, we propose a novel Cycle-aware Phase-Amplitude Modulation Network (PAMNet) that explicitly decomposes periodic patterns into complementary phase and amplitude components. The core innovation lies in its dual-branch modulator, featuring dedicated learnable embeddings for phase positioning and amplitude modulation. The phase branch employs cyclical embeddings to capture phase-dependent mean shifts, while the amplitude branch models intensity variations to adapt to changes in variance. A lightweight modulator with element-wise fusion efficiently combines these components, enabling explicit modeling of their interactions without complex attention mechanisms. Extensive experiments on twelve real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance through its novel phase-amplitude decoupling mechanism, offering a new perspective for cyclical modeling in time series forecasting.

preprint2026arXiv

PAMod: Modeling Cyclical Shifts via Phase-Amplitude Modulation for Non-stationary Time Series Forecasting

Real-world time series forecasting faces the fundamental challenge of non-stationary statistical properties, including shifts in mean and variance over time. While reversible instance normalization (RevIN) has shown promise by stationarizing inputs and denormalizing outputs, it relies on the strong assumption that historical and future distributions remain identical. We observe that in many practical applications, distribution shifts follow cyclical patterns that correlate with periodic positions (e.g., seasonal and holiday volatility). To this end, we propose PAMod, a lightweight yet powerful framework that models cyclical distribution shifts via Phase-Amplitude Modulation in the normalized feature space. PAMod learns periodic embeddings to modulate representations: phase modulation captures mean shifts, while amplitude modulation adapts to variance changes. Crucially, we prove mathematically that modulating in normalized space is equivalent to applying dynamic denormalization, offering an elegant unification of distribution adaptation and representation learning. Extensive experiments on twelve real-world benchmarks demonstrate that PAMod achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer computational resources. Furthermore, our modulation mechanism, as a novel plug-and-play technique, can improve existing time-series forecasting methods with simple integration.

preprint2024arXiv

Contrastive Sequential Interaction Network Learning on Co-Evolving Riemannian Spaces

The sequential interaction network usually find itself in a variety of applications, e.g., recommender system. Herein, inferring future interaction is of fundamental importance, and previous efforts are mainly focused on the dynamics in the classic zero-curvature Euclidean space. Despite the promising results achieved by previous methods, a range of significant issues still largely remains open: On the bipartite nature, is it appropriate to place user and item nodes in one identical space regardless of their inherent difference? On the network dynamics, instead of a fixed curvature space, will the representation spaces evolve when new interactions arrive continuously? On the learning paradigm, can we get rid of the label information costly to acquire? To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a novel Contrastive model for Sequential Interaction Network learning on Co-Evolving RiEmannian spaces, CSINCERE. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to introduce a couple of co-evolving representation spaces, rather than a single or static space, and propose a co-contrastive learning for the sequential interaction network. In CSINCERE, we formulate a Cross-Space Aggregation for message-passing across representation spaces of different Riemannian geometries, and design a Neural Curvature Estimator based on Ricci curvatures for modeling the space evolvement over time. Thereafter, we present a Reweighed Co-Contrast between the temporal views of the sequential network, so that the couple of Riemannian spaces interact with each other for the interaction prediction without labels. Empirical results on 5 public datasets show the superiority of CSINCERE over the state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2024arXiv

Motif-aware Riemannian Graph Neural Network with Generative-Contrastive Learning

Graphs are typical non-Euclidean data of complex structures. In recent years, Riemannian graph representation learning has emerged as an exciting alternative to Euclidean ones. However, Riemannian methods are still in an early stage: most of them present a single curvature (radius) regardless of structural complexity, suffer from numerical instability due to the exponential/logarithmic map, and lack the ability to capture motif regularity. In light of the issues above, we propose the problem of \emph{Motif-aware Riemannian Graph Representation Learning}, seeking a numerically stable encoder to capture motif regularity in a diverse-curvature manifold without labels. To this end, we present a novel Motif-aware Riemannian model with Generative-Contrastive learning (MotifRGC), which conducts a minmax game in Riemannian manifold in a self-supervised manner. First, we propose a new type of Riemannian GCN (D-GCN), in which we construct a diverse-curvature manifold by a product layer with the diversified factor, and replace the exponential/logarithmic map by a stable kernel layer. Second, we introduce a motif-aware Riemannian generative-contrastive learning to capture motif regularity in the constructed manifold and learn motif-aware node representation without external labels. Empirical results show the superiority of MofitRGC.

preprint2023arXiv

CLIP-ReID: Exploiting Vision-Language Model for Image Re-Identification without Concrete Text Labels

Pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP have recently shown superior performances on various downstream tasks, including image classification and segmentation. However, in fine-grained image re-identification (ReID), the labels are indexes, lacking concrete text descriptions. Therefore, it remains to be determined how such models could be applied to these tasks. This paper first finds out that simply fine-tuning the visual model initialized by the image encoder in CLIP, has already obtained competitive performances in various ReID tasks. Then we propose a two-stage strategy to facilitate a better visual representation. The key idea is to fully exploit the cross-modal description ability in CLIP through a set of learnable text tokens for each ID and give them to the text encoder to form ambiguous descriptions. In the first training stage, image and text encoders from CLIP keep fixed, and only the text tokens are optimized from scratch by the contrastive loss computed within a batch. In the second stage, the ID-specific text tokens and their encoder become static, providing constraints for fine-tuning the image encoder. With the help of the designed loss in the downstream task, the image encoder is able to represent data as vectors in the feature embedding accurately. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is validated on several datasets for the person or vehicle ReID tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Syliz517/CLIP-ReID.

preprint2023arXiv

Measuring tail risk at high-frequency: An $L_1$-regularized extreme value regression approach with unit-root predictors

We study tail risk dynamics in high-frequency financial markets and their connection with trading activity and market uncertainty. We introduce a dynamic extreme value regression model accommodating both stationary and local unit-root predictors to appropriately capture the time-varying behaviour of the distribution of high-frequency extreme losses. To characterize trading activity and market uncertainty, we consider several volatility and liquidity predictors, and propose a two-step adaptive $L_1$-regularized maximum likelihood estimator to select the most appropriate ones. We establish the oracle property of the proposed estimator for selecting both stationary and local unit-root predictors, and show its good finite sample properties in an extensive simulation study. Studying the high-frequency extreme losses of nine large liquid U.S. stocks using 42 liquidity and volatility predictors, we find the severity of extreme losses to be well predicted by low levels of price impact in period of high volatility of liquidity and volatility.

preprint2023arXiv

Towards Long-term Autonomy: A Perspective from Robot Learning

In the future, service robots are expected to be able to operate autonomously for long periods of time without human intervention. Many work striving for this goal have been emerging with the development of robotics, both hardware and software. Today we believe that an important underpinning of long-term robot autonomy is the ability of robots to learn on site and on-the-fly, especially when they are deployed in changing environments or need to traverse different environments. In this paper, we examine the problem of long-term autonomy from the perspective of robot learning, especially in an online way, and discuss in tandem its premise "data" and the subsequent "deployment".

preprint2022arXiv

3D ToF LiDAR in Mobile Robotics: A Review

In the past ten years, the use of 3D Time-of-Flight (ToF) LiDARs in mobile robotics has grown rapidly. Based on our accumulation of relevant research, this article systematically reviews and analyzes the use 3D ToF LiDARs in research and industrial applications. The former includes object detection, robot localization, long-term autonomy, LiDAR data processing under adverse weather conditions, and sensor fusion. The latter encompasses service robots, assisted and autonomous driving, and recent applications performed in response to public health crises. We hope that our efforts can effectively provide readers with relevant references and promote the deployment of existing mature technologies in real-world systems.

preprint2022arXiv

A Self-supervised Riemannian GNN with Time Varying Curvature for Temporal Graph Learning

Representation learning on temporal graphs has drawn considerable research attention owing to its fundamental importance in a wide spectrum of real-world applications. Though a number of studies succeed in obtaining time-dependent representations, it still faces significant challenges. On the one hand, most of the existing methods restrict the embedding space with a certain curvature. However, the underlying geometry in fact shifts among the positive curvature hyperspherical, zero curvature Euclidean and negative curvature hyperbolic spaces in the evolvement over time. On the other hand, these methods usually require abundant labels to learn temporal representations, and thereby notably limit their wide use in the unlabeled graphs of the real applications. To bridge this gap, we make the first attempt to study the problem of self-supervised temporal graph representation learning in the general Riemannian space, supporting the time-varying curvature to shift among hyperspherical, Euclidean and hyperbolic spaces. In this paper, we present a novel self-supervised Riemannian graph neural network (SelfRGNN). Specifically, we design a curvature-varying Riemannian GNN with a theoretically grounded time encoding, and formulate a functional curvature over time to model the evolvement shifting among the positive, zero and negative curvature spaces. To enable the self-supervised learning, we propose a novel reweighting self-contrastive approach, exploring the Riemannian space itself without augmentation, and propose an edge-based self-supervised curvature learning with the Ricci curvature. Extensive experiments show the superiority of SelfRGNN, and moreover, the case study shows the time-varying curvature of temporal graph in reality.

preprint2022arXiv

Bootstrapping ViTs: Towards Liberating Vision Transformers from Pre-training

Recently, vision Transformers (ViTs) are developing rapidly and starting to challenge the domination of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in the realm of computer vision (CV). With the general-purpose Transformer architecture replacing the hard-coded inductive biases of convolution, ViTs have surpassed CNNs, especially in data-sufficient circumstances. However, ViTs are prone to over-fit on small datasets and thus rely on large-scale pre-training, which expends enormous time. In this paper, we strive to liberate ViTs from pre-training by introducing CNNs' inductive biases back to ViTs while preserving their network architectures for higher upper bound and setting up more suitable optimization objectives. To begin with, an agent CNN is designed based on the given ViT with inductive biases. Then a bootstrapping training algorithm is proposed to jointly optimize the agent and ViT with weight sharing, during which the ViT learns inductive biases from the intermediate features of the agent. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet-1k with limited training data have shown encouraging results that the inductive biases help ViTs converge significantly faster and outperform conventional CNNs with even fewer parameters. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhfeing/Bootstrapping-ViTs-pytorch.

preprint2022arXiv

CO(J = 1-0) Observations toward the Filamentary Cloud in the Galactic Region of $153.60^{\circ} \leqslant l \leqslant 156.50^{\circ}$ and $1.85^{\circ} \leqslant b \leqslant 3.50^{\circ}$

We present observations of $J$=1-0 transition lines of ${ }^{12} \mathrm{CO}$, ${ }^{13} \mathrm{CO}$, and $\mathrm{C}^{18} \mathrm{O}$ towards the Galactic region of $153.60^{\circ} \leqslant l \leqslant 156.50^{\circ}$ and $1.85^{\circ} \leqslant b \leqslant 3.50^{\circ}$, using the Purple Mountain Observatory (PMO) 13.7 m millimeter telescope. Based on the \tht data, one main filament and five sub-filaments are found together as a network structure in the velocity interval of $[-42.5, -30.0] \,\mathrm{km} \mathrm{\,s}^{-1}$. The kinematic distance of this molecular cloud (MC) is estimated to be $\sim4.5 \mathrm{\,kpc}$. The median length, width, excitation temperature, line mass of these filaments are $\sim49 \mathrm{\,pc}$, $\sim2.9 \mathrm{\,pc}$, $\sim8.9 \mathrm{\,K}$, and $\sim39 \,M_{\odot} \mathrm{pc}^{-1}$, respectively. The velocity structures along these filaments exhibit oscillatory patterns, which are likely caused by the fragmentation or accretion process along these filaments. The maximum accretion rate is estimated to be as high as $\sim700 \,M_{\odot} \mathrm{pc}^{-1}$. A total of $\sim162$ \tht clumps and $\sim 103$ young stellar objects (YSOs) are identified in this region. Most of the clumps are in gravitationally bound states. Three \hii regions (G154.359+2.606, SH2-211, SH2-212) are found to be located in the apexes of the filaments. Intense star forming activities are found along the entire filamentary cloud. The observed results may help us to better understand the link between filaments and massive star formation.

preprint2022arXiv

Context-aware Self-supervised Learning for Medical Images Using Graph Neural Network

Although self-supervised learning enables us to bootstrap the training by exploiting unlabeled data, the generic self-supervised methods for natural images do not sufficiently incorporate the context. For medical images, a desirable method should be sensitive enough to detect deviation from normal-appearing tissue of each anatomical region; here, anatomy is the context. We introduce a novel approach with two levels of self-supervised representation learning objectives: one on the regional anatomical level and another on the patient-level. We use graph neural networks to incorporate the relationship between different anatomical regions. The structure of the graph is informed by anatomical correspondences between each patient and an anatomical atlas. In addition, the graph representation has the advantage of handling any arbitrarily sized image in full resolution. Experiments on large-scale Computer Tomography (CT) datasets of lung images show that our approach compares favorably to baseline methods that do not account for the context. We use the learned embedding for staging lung tissue abnormalities related to COVID-19.

preprint2022arXiv

Cross Attention Based Style Distribution for Controllable Person Image Synthesis

Controllable person image synthesis task enables a wide range of applications through explicit control over body pose and appearance. In this paper, we propose a cross attention based style distribution module that computes between the source semantic styles and target pose for pose transfer. The module intentionally selects the style represented by each semantic and distributes them according to the target pose. The attention matrix in cross attention expresses the dynamic similarities between the target pose and the source styles for all semantics. Therefore, it can be utilized to route the color and texture from the source image, and is further constrained by the target parsing map to achieve a clearer objective. At the same time, to encode the source appearance accurately, the self attention among different semantic styles is also added. The effectiveness of our model is validated quantitatively and qualitatively on pose transfer and virtual try-on tasks.

preprint2022arXiv

DGFont++: Robust Deformable Generative Networks for Unsupervised Font Generation

Automatic font generation without human experts is a practical and significant problem, especially for some languages that consist of a large number of characters. Existing methods for font generation are often in supervised learning. They require a large number of paired data, which are labor-intensive and expensive to collect. In contrast, common unsupervised image-to-image translation methods are not applicable to font generation, as they often define style as the set of textures and colors. In this work, we propose a robust deformable generative network for unsupervised font generation (abbreviated as DGFont++). We introduce a feature deformation skip connection (FDSC) to learn local patterns and geometric transformations between fonts. The FDSC predicts pairs of displacement maps and employs the predicted maps to apply deformable convolution to the low-level content feature maps. The outputs of FDSC are fed into a mixer to generate final results. Moreover, we introduce contrastive self-supervised learning to learn a robust style representation for fonts by understanding the similarity and dissimilarities of fonts. To distinguish different styles, we train our model with a multi-task discriminator, which ensures that each style can be discriminated independently. In addition to adversarial loss, another two reconstruction losses are adopted to constrain the domain-invariant characteristics between generated images and content images. Taking advantage of FDSC and the adopted loss functions, our model is able to maintain spatial information and generates high-quality character images in an unsupervised manner. Experiments demonstrate that our model is able to generate character images of higher quality than state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Federated Selective Aggregation for Knowledge Amalgamation

In this paper, we explore a new knowledge-amalgamation problem, termed Federated Selective Aggregation (FedSA). The goal of FedSA is to train a student model for a new task with the help of several decentralized teachers, whose pre-training tasks and data are different and agnostic. Our motivation for investigating such a problem setup stems from a recent dilemma of model sharing. Many researchers or institutes have spent enormous resources on training large and competent networks. Due to the privacy, security, or intellectual property issues, they are, however, not able to share their own pre-trained models, even if they wish to contribute to the community. The proposed FedSA offers a solution to this dilemma and makes it one step further since, again, the learned student may specialize in a new task different from all of the teachers. To this end, we proposed a dedicated strategy for handling FedSA. Specifically, our student-training process is driven by a novel saliency-based approach that adaptively selects teachers as the participants and integrates their representative capabilities into the student. To evaluate the effectiveness of FedSA, we conduct experiments on both single-task and multi-task settings. Experimental results demonstrate that FedSA effectively amalgamates knowledge from decentralized models and achieves competitive performance to centralized baselines.

preprint2022arXiv

Hierarchical Amortized Training for Memory-efficient High Resolution 3D GAN

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have many potential medical imaging applications, including data augmentation, domain adaptation, and model explanation. Due to the limited memory of Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), most current 3D GAN models are trained on low-resolution medical images, these models either cannot scale to high-resolution or are prone to patchy artifacts. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end GAN architecture that can generate high-resolution 3D images. We achieve this goal by using different configurations between training and inference. During training, we adopt a hierarchical structure that simultaneously generates a low-resolution version of the image and a randomly selected sub-volume of the high-resolution image. The hierarchical design has two advantages: First, the memory demand for training on high-resolution images is amortized among sub-volumes. Furthermore, anchoring the high-resolution sub-volumes to a single low-resolution image ensures anatomical consistency between sub-volumes. During inference, our model can directly generate full high-resolution images. We also incorporate an encoder with a similar hierarchical structure into the model to extract features from the images. Experiments on 3D thorax CT and brain MRI demonstrate that our approach outperforms state of the art in image generation. We also demonstrate clinical applications of the proposed model in data augmentation and clinical-relevant feature extraction.

preprint2022arXiv

PERFECT: A Hyperbolic Embedding for Joint User and Community Alignment

Social network alignment shows fundamental importance in a wide spectrum of applications. To the best of our knowledge, existing studies mainly focus on network alignment at the individual user level, requiring abundant common information between shared individual users. For the networks that cannot meet such requirements, social community structures actually provide complementary and critical information at a slightly coarse-grained level, alignment of which will provide additional information for user alignment. In turn, user alignment also reveals more clues for community alignment. Hence, in this paper, we introduce the problem of joint social network alignment, which aims to align users and communities across social networks simultaneously. Key challenges lie in that 1) how to learn the representations of both users and communities, and 2) how to make user alignment and community alignment benefit from each other. To address these challenges, we first elaborate on the characteristics of real-world networks with the notion of delta-hyperbolicity, and show the superiority of hyperbolic space for representing social networks. Then, we present a novel hyperbolic embedding approach for the joint social network alignment, referred to as PERFECT, in a unified optimization. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show the superiority of PERFECT in both user alignment and community alignment.

preprint2022arXiv

QS-Attn: Query-Selected Attention for Contrastive Learning in I2I Translation

Unpaired image-to-image (I2I) translation often requires to maximize the mutual information between the source and the translated images across different domains, which is critical for the generator to keep the source content and prevent it from unnecessary modifications. The self-supervised contrastive learning has already been successfully applied in the I2I. By constraining features from the same location to be closer than those from different ones, it implicitly ensures the result to take content from the source. However, previous work uses the features from random locations to impose the constraint, which may not be appropriate since some locations contain less information of source domain. Moreover, the feature itself does not reflect the relation with others. This paper deals with these problems by intentionally selecting significant anchor points for contrastive learning. We design a query-selected attention (QS-Attn) module, which compares feature distances in the source domain, giving an attention matrix with a probability distribution in each row. Then we select queries according to their measurement of significance, computed from the distribution. The selected ones are regarded as anchors for contrastive loss. At the same time, the reduced attention matrix is employed to route features in both domains, so that source relations maintain in the synthesis. We validate our proposed method in three different I2I datasets, showing that it increases the image quality without adding learnable parameters.

preprint2022arXiv

Style Transformer for Image Inversion and Editing

Existing GAN inversion methods fail to provide latent codes for reliable reconstruction and flexible editing simultaneously. This paper presents a transformer-based image inversion and editing model for pretrained StyleGAN which is not only with less distortions, but also of high quality and flexibility for editing. The proposed model employs a CNN encoder to provide multi-scale image features as keys and values. Meanwhile it regards the style code to be determined for different layers of the generator as queries. It first initializes query tokens as learnable parameters and maps them into W+ space. Then the multi-stage alternate self- and cross-attention are utilized, updating queries with the purpose of inverting the input by the generator. Moreover, based on the inverted code, we investigate the reference- and label-based attribute editing through a pretrained latent classifier, and achieve flexible image-to-image translation with high quality results. Extensive experiments are carried out, showing better performances on both inversion and editing tasks within StyleGAN.

preprint2021arXiv

Adaptive Random Bandwidth for Inference in CAViaR Models

This paper investigates the size performance of Wald tests for CAViaR models (Engle and Manganelli, 2004). We find that the usual estimation strategy on test statistics yields inaccuracies. Indeed, we show that existing density estimation methods cannot adapt to the time-variation in the conditional probability densities of CAViaR models. Consequently, we develop a method called adaptive random bandwidth which can approximate time-varying conditional probability densities robustly for inference testing on CAViaR models based on the asymptotic normality of the model parameter estimator. This proposed method also avoids the problem of choosing an optimal bandwidth in estimating probability densities, and can be extended to multivariate quantile regressions straightforward.

preprint2020arXiv

Disentangling the Spatial Structure and Style in Conditional VAE

This paper aims to disentangle the latent space in cVAE into the spatial structure and the style code, which are complementary to each other, with one of them $z_s$ being label relevant and the other $z_u$ irrelevant. The generator is built by a connected encoder-decoder and a label condition mapping network. Depending on whether the label is related with the spatial structure, the output $z_s$ from the condition mapping network is used either as a style code or a spatial structure code. The encoder provides the label irrelevant posterior from which $z_u$ is sampled. The decoder employs $z_s$ and $z_u$ in each layer by adaptive normalization like SPADE or AdaIN. Extensive experiments on two datasets with different types of labels show the effectiveness of our method.

preprint2020arXiv

Enhancing Graph Neural Network-based Fraud Detectors against Camouflaged Fraudsters

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely applied to fraud detection problems in recent years, revealing the suspiciousness of nodes by aggregating their neighborhood information via different relations. However, few prior works have noticed the camouflage behavior of fraudsters, which could hamper the performance of GNN-based fraud detectors during the aggregation process. In this paper, we introduce two types of camouflages based on recent empirical studies, i.e., the feature camouflage and the relation camouflage. Existing GNNs have not addressed these two camouflages, which results in their poor performance in fraud detection problems. Alternatively, we propose a new model named CAmouflage-REsistant GNN (CARE-GNN), to enhance the GNN aggregation process with three unique modules against camouflages. Concretely, we first devise a label-aware similarity measure to find informative neighboring nodes. Then, we leverage reinforcement learning (RL) to find the optimal amounts of neighbors to be selected. Finally, the selected neighbors across different relations are aggregated together. Comprehensive experiments on two real-world fraud datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the RL algorithm. The proposed CARE-GNN also outperforms state-of-the-art GNNs and GNN-based fraud detectors. We integrate all GNN-based fraud detectors as an opensource toolbox: https://github.com/safe-graph/DGFraud. The CARE-GNN code and datasets are available at https://github.com/YingtongDou/CARE-GNN.

preprint2020arXiv

EU Long-term Dataset with Multiple Sensors for Autonomous Driving

The field of autonomous driving has grown tremendously over the past few years, along with the rapid progress in sensor technology. One of the major purposes of using sensors is to provide environment perception for vehicle understanding, learning and reasoning, and ultimately interacting with the environment. In this paper, we first introduce a multisensor platform allowing vehicle to perceive its surroundings and locate itself in a more efficient and accurate way. The platform integrates eleven heterogeneous sensors including various cameras and lidars, a radar, an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit), and a GPS-RTK (Global Positioning System / Real-Time Kinematic), while exploits a ROS (Robot Operating System) based software to process the sensory data. Then, we present a new dataset (https://epan-utbm.github.io/utbm_robocar_dataset/) for autonomous driving captured many new research challenges (e.g. highly dynamic environment), and especially for long-term autonomy (e.g. creating and maintaining maps), collected with our instrumented vehicle, publicly available to the community.

preprint2020arXiv

Graph-Bert: Only Attention is Needed for Learning Graph Representations

The dominant graph neural networks (GNNs) over-rely on the graph links, several serious performance problems with which have been witnessed already, e.g., suspended animation problem and over-smoothing problem. What's more, the inherently inter-connected nature precludes parallelization within the graph, which becomes critical for large-sized graph, as memory constraints limit batching across the nodes. In this paper, we will introduce a new graph neural network, namely GRAPH-BERT (Graph based BERT), solely based on the attention mechanism without any graph convolution or aggregation operators. Instead of feeding GRAPH-BERT with the complete large input graph, we propose to train GRAPH-BERT with sampled linkless subgraphs within their local contexts. GRAPH-BERT can be learned effectively in a standalone mode. Meanwhile, a pre-trained GRAPH-BERT can also be transferred to other application tasks directly or with necessary fine-tuning if any supervised label information or certain application oriented objective is available. We have tested the effectiveness of GRAPH-BERT on several graph benchmark datasets. Based the pre-trained GRAPH-BERT with the node attribute reconstruction and structure recovery tasks, we further fine-tune GRAPH-BERT on node classification and graph clustering tasks specifically. The experimental results have demonstrated that GRAPH-BERT can out-perform the existing GNNs in both the learning effectiveness and efficiency.

preprint2020arXiv

Learning Posterior and Prior for Uncertainty Modeling in Person Re-Identification

Data uncertainty in practical person reID is ubiquitous, hence it requires not only learning the discriminative features, but also modeling the uncertainty based on the input. This paper proposes to learn the sample posterior and the class prior distribution in the latent space, so that not only representative features but also the uncertainty can be built by the model. The prior reflects the distribution of all data in the same class, and it is the trainable model parameters. While the posterior is the probability density of a single sample, so it is actually the feature defined on the input. We assume that both of them are in Gaussian form. To simultaneously model them, we put forward a distribution loss, which measures the KL divergence from the posterior to the priors in the manner of supervised learning. In addition, we assume that the posterior variance, which is essentially the uncertainty, is supposed to have the second-order characteristic. Therefore, a $Σ-$net is proposed to compute it by the high order representation from its input. Extensive experiments have been carried out on Market1501, DukeMTMC, MARS and noisy dataset as well.

preprint2020arXiv

Localising Faster: Efficient and precise lidar-based robot localisation in large-scale environments

This paper proposes a novel approach for global localisation of mobile robots in large-scale environments. Our method leverages learning-based localisation and filtering-based localisation, to localise the robot efficiently and precisely through seeding Monte Carlo Localisation (MCL) with a deep-learned distribution. In particular, a fast localisation system rapidly estimates the 6-DOF pose through a deep-probabilistic model (Gaussian Process Regression with a deep kernel), then a precise recursive estimator refines the estimated robot pose according to the geometric alignment. More importantly, the Gaussian method (i.e. deep probabilistic localisation) and non-Gaussian method (i.e. MCL) can be integrated naturally via importance sampling. Consequently, the two systems can be integrated seamlessly and mutually benefit from each other. To verify the proposed framework, we provide a case study in large-scale localisation with a 3D lidar sensor. Our experiments on the Michigan NCLT long-term dataset show that the proposed method is able to localise the robot in 1.94 s on average (median of 0.8 s) with precision 0.75~m in a large-scale environment of approximately 0.5 km2.

preprint2020arXiv

Novel View Synthesis on Unpaired Data by Conditional Deformable Variational Auto-Encoder

Novel view synthesis often needs the paired data from both the source and target views. This paper proposes a view translation model under cVAE-GAN framework without requiring the paired data. We design a conditional deformable module (CDM) which uses the view condition vectors as the filters to convolve the feature maps of the main branch in VAE. It generates several pairs of displacement maps to deform the features, like the 2D optical flows. The results are fed into the deformed feature based normalization module (DFNM), which scales and offsets the main branch feature, given its deformed one as the input from the side branch. Taking the advantage of the CDM and DFNM, the encoder outputs a view-irrelevant posterior, while the decoder takes the code drawn from it to synthesize the reconstructed and the viewtranslated images. To further ensure the disentanglement between the views and other factors, we add adversarial training on the code. The results and ablation studies on MultiPIE and 3D chair datasets validate the effectiveness of the framework in cVAE and the designed module.

preprint2020arXiv

Quantum locally linear embedding for nonlinear dimensionality reduction

Reducing the dimension of nonlinear data is crucial in data processing and visualization. The locally linear embedding algorithm (LLE) is specifically a representative nonlinear dimensionality reduction method with well maintaining the original manifold structure. In this paper, we present two implementations of the quantum locally linear embedding algorithm (QLLE) to perform the nonlinear dimensionality reduction on quantum devices. One implementation, the linear-algebra-based QLLE algorithm, utilizes quantum linear algebra subroutines to reduce the dimension of the given data. The other implementation, the variational quantum locally linear embedding algorithm (VQLLE) utilizes a variational hybrid quantum-classical procedure to acquire the low-dimensional data. The classical LLE algorithm requires polynomial time complexity of $N$, where $N$ is the global number of the original high-dimensional data. Compared with the classical LLE, the linear-algebra-based QLLE achieves quadratic speedup in the number and dimension of the given data. The VQLLE can be implemented on the near term quantum devices in two different designs. In addition, the numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate that the two implementations in our work can achieve the procedure of locally linear embedding.

preprint2017arXiv

Weakly-supervised DCNN for RGB-D Object Recognition in Real-World Applications Which Lack Large-scale Annotated Training Data

This paper addresses the problem of RGBD object recognition in real-world applications, where large amounts of annotated training data are typically unavailable. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel, weakly-supervised learning architecture (DCNN-GPC) which combines parametric models (a pair of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) for RGB and D modalities) with non-parametric models (Gaussian Process Classification). Our system is initially trained using a small amount of labeled data, and then automatically prop- agates labels to large-scale unlabeled data. We first run 3D- based objectness detection on RGBD videos to acquire many unlabeled object proposals, and then employ DCNN-GPC to label them. As a result, our multi-modal DCNN can be trained end-to-end using only a small amount of human annotation. Finally, our 3D-based objectness detection and multi-modal DCNN are integrated into a real-time detection and recognition pipeline. In our approach, bounding-box annotations are not required and boundary-aware detection is achieved. We also propose a novel way to pretrain a DCNN for the depth modality, by training on virtual depth images projected from CAD models. We pretrain our multi-modal DCNN on public 3D datasets, achieving performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods on Washington RGBS Dataset. We then finetune the network by further training on a small amount of annotated data from our novel dataset of industrial objects (nuclear waste simulants). Our weakly supervised approach has demonstrated to be highly effective in solving a novel RGBD object recognition application which lacks of human annotations.