United States

Automatically localizing a position based on a few natural language instructions is essential for future robots to communicate and collaborate with humans. To approach this goal, we focus on a text-to-point-cloud cross-modal localization
problem. Given a textual query, it aims to identify the described location from city-scale point clouds. The task involves two challenges. 1) In city-scale point clouds, similar ambient instances may exist in several locations. Searching each location in a huge point cloud with only instances as guidance may lead to less discriminative signals and incorrect results. 2) In textual descriptions, the hints are provided separately. In this case, the relations among those hints are not
explicitly described, leaving the difficulties of learning relations to the agent itself. To alleviate the two challenges, we propose a unified Relation-Enhanced Transformer (RET) to improve representation discriminability for both point cloud
and nature language queries. The core of the proposed RET is a novel Relation-enhanced Self-Attention (RSA) mechanism, which explicitly encodes instance (hint)-wise relations for the two modalities. Moreover, we propose a fine-grained cross-modal matching method to further refine the location predictions in a subsequent instance-hint matching stage. Experimental results on the KITTI360Pose dataset demonstrate that our approach surpasses the previous state-of-the-art method by large margins.

AAAI 2023

Text to Point Cloud Localization with Relation-Enhanced Transformer

point clouds

cross-modal

vision and language

transformer

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
AAAI is providing you with a conference planner, which you can use to help organize your itinerary of activities. This includes talks to attend in person, talks to attend remotely, breaks with colleagues and your site seeing activities. To access this conference planner, please go to [https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io](https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io).

In order to access this site, you need to register. If you haven't already, please register [here](https://aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI-23/registration/).


The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

poster

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to learn a model trained on source domain and performs well on unlabeled target domain. In medical image segmentation field, most existing UDA methods depend on adversarial learning to address the domain gap between different image modalities, which is ineffective due to its complicated training process. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective UDA method based on frequency and spatial domain transfer under multi-teacher distillation framework. In the frequency domain, we first introduce non-subsampled contourlet transform for identifying domain-invariant and domain-variant frequency components (DIFs and DVFs), and then keep the DIFs unchanged while replacing the DVFs of the source domain images with that of the target domain images to narrow the domain gap. In the spatial domain, we propose a batch momentum update-based histogram matching strategy to reduce the domain-variant image style bias. Experiments on two commonly used cross-modality medical image segmentation datasets show that our proposed method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Reducing Domain Gap in Frequency and Spatial domain for Cross-modality Domain Adaptation on Medical Image Segmentation

Most existing light field (LF) disparity estimation algorithms focus on handling occlusion, texture-less or other areas that harm LF structure to improve accuracy, while ignoring other potential modeling ideas. In this paper, we propose a novel idea called Bad Pixel (BadPix) correction for method modeling, then implement a general post-refinement network for LF disparity estimation: Bad-pixel Correction Network (BpCNet). Given an initial disparity map generated by a specific algorithm, we assume that all BadPixs on it are in a small range $\delta$. Then BpCNet is modeled as a fine-grained search strategy, and a more accurate result can be obtained by evaluating the consistency of light field images in this limited range. Due to the assumption and the consistency between input and output, BpCNet can perform as a 1) lightweight (only about 1.14M parameters as $\delta$ is very small)  2) general (can work on almost all existing algorithms as the input is disparity map)   3) iterative (can optimize multiple times as the input equals output)  post-refinement network. We demonstrate the feasibility of our  theory through extensive experiments, and achieve remarkable performance on the HCI 4D Light Field Benchmark. 

Take Your Model Further: A General Post-refinement Network for Light Field Disparity Estimation via BadPix Correction

With the rapid development of the airline
industry, maximizing the market share with a
constrained budget is an urgent econometric problem for an airline. We investigate the problem by adjusting flight frequencies on different flight routes. Owing to the large search space of solutions and the difficulty of predicting the market, this problem is in general daunting to solve. This paper proposes a novel two-stage optimization method to address the challenges. On the higher level, we use a signal to guide the optimization process toward a constrained satisfying solution. On the lower level, we consider the consecutive itineraries in real scenarios and model the unseen correlations between routes in itineraries for market share prediction. In theory, we prove the convergence of our optimization approach. In the experiment, we empirically verify the superiority of both our prediction model and optimization approach over existing works with large-scale real-world data. Our code has been released at: https://github.com/codingAndBS/AirlineMarket.

Constrained Market Share Maximization by Signal-guided Optimization

Self-supervised monocular methods can efficiently learn depth information of weakly textured surfaces or reflective objects. However, the depth accuracy is limited due to the inherent ambiguity in monocular geometric modeling. In contrast, multi-frame depth estimation methods improve the depth accuracy thanks to the success of Multi-View Stereo (MVS), which directly makes use of geometric constraints. Unfortunately, MVS often suffers from texture-less regions, non-Lambertian surfaces, and moving objects, especially in real-world video sequences without known camera motion and depth supervision. Therefore, we propose MOVEDepth, which exploits the MOnocular cues and VElocity gudiance to improve multi-frame Depth learning. Unlike existing methods that enforce consistency between MVS depth and monocular depth, MOVEDepth boosts multi-frame depth learning by directly addressing the inherent problems of MVS. The key of our approach is to utilize monocular depth as a geometric priority to construct MVS cost volume, and adjust depth candidates of cost volume under the guidance of predicted camera velocity. We further fuse monocular depth and MVS depth by learning uncertainty in the cost volume, which results in a robust depth estimation against ambiguity in multi-view geometry. Extensive experiments show MOVEDepth achieves state-of-the-art performance: Compared with Monodepth2 and PackNet, our method relatively improves the depth accuracy by 20% and 19.8% on the KITTI benchmark. MOVEDepth also generalizes to the more challenging DDAD benchmark, relatively outperforming ManyDepth by 7.2%. The code will be made publicly available.

Crafting Monocular Cues and Velocity Guidance for Self-Supervised Multi-Frame Depth Learning

Effectively  preserving and encoding structure features from objects in irregular and sparse LiDAR points is a crucial challenge to 3D object detection on the point cloud. Recently, Transformer has demonstrated promising performance on many 2D and even 3D vision tasks. Compared with the fixed and rigid convolution kernels, the self-attention mechanism in Transformer can adaptively exclude the unrelated or noisy points and is thus suitable for preserving the local spatial structure in the irregular LiDAR point cloud. However, Transformer only performs a simple sum on the point features, based on the self-attention mechanism, and all the points share the same transformation for \textit{value}.  A such isotropic operation cannot capture the direction-distance-oriented local structure, which is essential for 3D object detection. In this work, we propose a Structure-Embedding transFormer (SEFormer), which can not only preserve the local structure as a traditional Transformer but also have the ability to encode the local structure. Compared to the self-attention mechanism in traditional Transformer, SEFormer learns different feature transformations for \textit{value} points based on the relative directions and distances to the query point. Then we propose a SEFormer-based network for high-performance 3D object detection. Extensive experiments show that the proposed architecture can achieve SOTA results on the Waymo Open Dataset, one of the most significant 3D detection benchmarks for autonomous driving. Specifically, SEFormer achieves 79.02% mAP, which is 1.2% higher than existing works. We will release the codes.

SEFormer: Structure Embedding Transformer for 3D Object Detection

Single-source domain generalization (SDG) in medical image segmentation is a challenging yet essential task as domain shifts are quite common among clinical image datasets. Previous attempts most conduct global-only/random augmentation.  Their augmented samples are usually insufficient in diversity and informativeness, thus failing to cover the possible target domain distribution. In this paper, we rethink the data augmentation strategy for SDG in medical image segmentation. Motivated by the class-level representation invariance and style mutability of medical images, we hypothesize that  unseen target data can be sampled from a linear combination of C (the class number) random variables, where each variable follows a location-scale distribution at the class level. Accordingly, data augmented can be readily made by sampling the random variables through a general form. On the empirical front, we implement such strategy with constrained Bezier transformation on both  global and  local (i.e. class-level) regions, which can largely increase the augmentation diversity.  A Saliency-balancing Fusion mechanism is further proposed to enrich the informativeness by engaging the gradient information, guiding augmentation with proper orientation and magnitude. As an important contribution, we prove theoretically that our proposed augmentation can lead to an upper bound of the generalization risk on the unseen  target domain, thus confirming our hypothesis. Combining the two strategies, our Saliency-balancing Location-scale Augmentation (SLAug) exceeds the state-of-the-art works by a large margin in two challenging SDG tasks.

Rethinking Data Augmentation for Single-source Domain Generalization in Medical Image Segmentation

We propose novel identification conditions and a statistical estimation method for the probabilities of potential outcome types using covariate information in randomized trials in which the treatment assignment is randomized but subject compliance is not perfect. Different from existing studies, the proposed identification conditions do not require strict assumptions such as the assumption of monotonicity. When the probabilities of potential outcome types are identifiable through the proposed conditions, the problem of estimating the probabilities of potential outcome types is reduced to that of singular models. Thus, the probabilities cannot be evaluated using standard statistical likelihood-based estimation methods. Rather, the proposed identification conditions show that we can derive consistent estimators of the probabilities of potential outcome types via the method of moments, which leads to the asymptotic normality of the proposed estimators through the delta method under regular conditions. We also propose a new statistical estimation method based on the bounded constrained augmented Lagrangian method to derive more efficient estimators than can be derived through the method of moments.

Identification and Estimation of the Probabilities of Potential Outcome Types Using Covariate Information in Studies with Non-compliance

The exploration of mutual-benefit cross-domains has shown great potential toward accurate self-supervised depth estimation. In this work, we revisit feature fusion between depth and semantic information and propose an efficient local adaptive attention method for geometric aware representation enhancement. Instead of building global connections or deforming attention across the feature space without restraint, we bound the spatial interaction within a learnable region of interest. In particular, we leverage geometric cues from semantic information to learn local adaptive bounding boxes to guide unsupervised feature aggregation. The local areas preclude most irrelevant reference points from attention space, yielding more selective feature learning and faster convergence. We naturally extend the paradigm into a multi-head and hierarchic way to enable the information distillation in different semantic levels and improve the feature discriminative ability for fine-grained depth estimation. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset show that our proposed method establishes a new state-of-the-art in self-supervised monocular depth estimation task, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach over former Transformer variants.

ROIFormer: Semantic-Aware Region of Interest Transformer for Efficient Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation

Massive rumors usually appear along with breaking news or trending topics, seriously hindering the truth. Existing rumor detection methods are mostly focused on the same domain, thus have poor performance in cross-domain scenarios due to domain shift. In this work, we propose an end-to-end instance-wise and prototype-wise contrastive learning model with cross-attention mechanism for cross-domain rumor detection. The model not only performs cross-domain
feature alignment, but also enforces target samples to align with the corresponding prototypes of a given source domain. Since target labels in a target domain are unavailable, we use a clustering-based approach with carefully initialized centers
by a batch of source domain samples to produce pseudo labels. Moreover, we use a cross-attention mechanism on a pair of source data and target data with the same labels to learn domain-invariant representations. Because the samples in a
domain pair tend to express similar semantic patterns especially on the people’s attitudes (e.g., supporting or denying) towards the same category of rumors, the discrepancy between a pair of source domain and target domain will be decreased. We conduct experiments on four groups of cross-domain datasets and show that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance.


Unsupervised Cross-Domain Rumor Detection with Contrastive Learning and Cross-Attention

Deep neural network, despite its remarkable capability of discriminating targeted in-distribution samples, shows poor performance on detecting anomalous out-of-distribution data. To address this defect, state-of-the-art solutions choose to train deep networks on an auxiliary dataset of outliers. Various training criteria for these auxiliary outliers are proposed based on heuristic intuitions. However, we find that these intuitively designed outlier training criteria can hurt in-distribution learning and eventually lead to inferior performance. To this end, we identify three causes of the in-distribution incompatibility: contradictory gradient, false likelihood, and distribution shift. Based on our new understandings, we propose a new out-of-distribution detection method by adapting both the top-design of deep models and the loss function. Our method achieves in-distribution compatibility by pursuing less interference with the probabilistic characteristic of in-distribution features. On several benchmarks, our method not only achieves the state-of-the-art out-of-distribution detection performance but also improves the in-distribution accuracy.

Downloads

Next from AAAI 2023

Reducing Domain Gap in Frequency and Spatial domain for Cross-modality Domain Adaptation on Medical Image Segmentation

Similar lecture

Few-shot 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation via Stratified Class-specific Attention Based Transformer Network