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State estimation problems without absolute position measurements routinely arise in navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles, 
autonomous ground vehicles, etc., whose proper operation relies on 
accurate state estimates and reliable covariances.
Unaware of absolute positions, these problems have immanent unobservable directions.
Traditional causal estimators, however, usually gain spurious information 
on the unobservable directions, leading to over-confident covariance inconsistent with actual estimator errors.
The consistency problem of fixed-lag smoothers (FLSs) 
has only been attacked by the first estimate Jacobian (FEJ) technique because 
of the complexity to analyze their observability property.
But the FEJ has several drawbacks hampering its wide adoption.
To ensure the consistency of a FLS, this paper introduces the right invariant
error formulation into the FLS framework. To our knowledge, 
we are the first to analyze the observability of a FLS with the right invariant error.
Our main contributions are twofold.
As the first novelty, to bypass the complexity of analysis with the classic 
observability matrix, we show that observability analysis of FLSs can be done equivalently on the linearized system.
Second, we prove that the inconsistency issue in the traditional FLS can be
elegantly solved by the right invariant error formulation without artificially correcting Jacobians.
By applying the proposed FLS to the monocular visual inertial
simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem,
we confirm that the method consistently
estimates covariance similarly to a batch smoother in simulation and that our method achieved comparable accuracy as traditional FLSs on real data.

AAAI 2021

Consistent Right-Invariant Fixed-Lag Smoother with Application to Visual Inertial SLAM

The 65th Annual Conference on Magnetism and Magnetic Materials (MMM 2020) was held in a virtual form. The COVID-19 pandemic, with its associated uncertainty about international travel and the ability to gather in large groups, meant that the Steering Committee decided to cancel the face-to-face meeting that had been planned in Palm Beach, Florida November 2-6, 2020.

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MMM 2020

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Purchase prediction is an essential task in both online and offline retail industry, especially during major shopping festivals, when strong promotion boosts consumption dramatically. It is important for merchants to forecast such surge of sales and have better preparation. This is a challenging problem, as the purchase patterns during shopping festivals are significantly different from usual cases and also rare in historical data. Most existing methods fail at this problem due to the extremely scarce data samples as well as the inability to capture the complex macroscopic spatio-temporal dependencies in a city. To address this problem, we propose the Spatio-Temporal Meta-learning Prediction (STMP) model for purchase prediction during shopping festivals. STMP is a meta-learning based spatio-temporal multi-task deep generative model. It adopts a meta-learning framework with few-shot learning capability to capture both spatial and temporal data representations. A generative component then uses the extracted spatio-temporal representation and input data to infer the prediction results. Extensive experiments demonstrate the meta-learning generalization ability of STMP. STMP outperforms baselines in all cases, which shows the effectiveness of our model.

Robust Spatio-Temporal Purchase Prediction via Deep Meta Learning

Understanding the effect of depth in deep learning is a critical problem. In this work, we utilize the Fourier analysis to empirically provide a promising mechanism to understand why feedforward deeper learning is faster. To this end,  we separate a deep neural network, trained by normal stochastic gradient descent, into two parts during analysis, i.e., a  pre-condition component and  a learning component, in which the output of the pre-condition one is the input of the learning one. We use a filtering method to characterize the frequency distribution of a high-dimensional function.  Based on experiments of deep networks and real dataset, we propose a deep frequency principle, that is, the effective target function for a deeper hidden layer biases towards  lower  frequency during the training. Therefore, the learning component effectively learns a lower frequency function if the pre-condition component has more layers. Due to the well-studied frequency principle, i.e., deep neural networks learn lower frequency functions faster, the deep frequency principle provides a reasonable explanation to why deeper learning is faster. We believe these empirical studies would be valuable for future theoretical studies of the effect of depth in deep learning.

Deep Frequency Principle Towards Understanding Why Deeper Learning Is Faster

Affinity Propagation (AP) is a fundamental algorithm to identify clusters included in data objects.
Given a similarities among objects, it iteratively performs message updates between all data object pairs until convergence.
Although AP yields a higher clustering quality compared with other methods, it is computationally expensive.
Hence, it has difficulty handling massive datasets that include numerous data objects.
This is because the message updates require a quadratic cost of the number of data objects.
Here, we propose a novel fast algorithm, ScaleAP, which outputs the same clusters as AP but within a shorter computation time.
ScaleAP dynamically excludes unnecessary message updates without sacrificing its clustering accuracy.
Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that ScaleAP outperforms existing AP algorithms in terms of running time by up to two orders of magnitude.

Scalable Affinity Propagation for Massive Datasets

Visual saliency has emerged as a major visualization tool for interpreting deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents. However, much of the existing research uses it as an analyzing tool rather than an inductive bias for policy learning. In this work, we use visual attention as an inductive bias for RL agents. We propose a novel self-supervised attention learning approach which can 1. learn to select regions of interest without explicit annotations, and 2. act as a plug for existing deep RL methods to improve the learning performance. We empirically show that the self-supervised attention-aware deep RL methods outperform the baselines in the context of both the rate of convergence and performance. Furthermore, the proposed self-supervised attention is not tied with specific policies, nor restricted to a specific scene. We posit that the proposed approach is a general self-supervised attention module for multi-task learning and transfer learning, and empirically validate the generalization ability of the proposed method. Finally, we show that our method learns meaningful object keypoints highlighting improvements both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Self-Supervised Attention-Aware Reinforcement Learning

Resource constrained path finding is a well studied topic in AI, with real-world applications in different areas such as transportation and robotics. This paper introduces several heuristics in the resource constrained path finding context that significantly improve the algorithmic performance of the initialisation phase and the core search. We implement our heuristics on top of a bidirectional A* algorithm and evaluate them on a set of large instances. The experimental results show that, for the first time in the context of constrained path finding, our fast and enhanced algorithm can solve all of the benchmark instances to optimality, and compared to the state of the art algorithms, it can improve existing runtimes by up to four orders of magnitude on large-size network graphs.

A Fast Exact Algorithm for the Resource Constrained Shortest Path Problem

Due to its robust and precise distance measurements, LiDAR plays an important role in scene understanding for autonomous driving. Training deep neural networks (DNNs) on LiDAR data requires large-scale point-wise annotations, which are time-consuming and expensive to obtain. Instead, simulation-to-real domain adaptation (SRDA) trains a DNN using unlimited synthetic data with automatically generated labels and transfers the learned model to real scenarios. Existing SRDA methods for LiDAR point cloud segmentation mainly employ a multi-stage pipeline and focus on feature-level alignment. They require prior knowledge of real-world statistics and ignore the pixel-level dropout noise gap and the spatial feature gap between different domains. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end framework, named ePointDA, to address the above issues. Specifically, ePointDA consists of three modules: self-supervised dropout noise rendering, statistics-invariant and spatially-adaptive feature alignment, and transferable segmentation learning. The joint optimization enables ePointDA to bridge the domain shift at the pixel-level by explicitly rendering dropout noise for synthetic LiDAR and at the feature-level by spatially aligning the features between different domains, without requiring the real-world statistics. Extensive experiments adapting from synthetic GTA-LiDAR to real KITTI and SemanticKITTI demonstrate the superiority of ePointDA for LiDAR point cloud segmentation.

ePointDA: An End-to-End Simulation-to-Real Domain Adaptation Framework for LiDAR Point Cloud Segmentation

Video instance segmentation is a complex task in which we need to detect, segment, and track each object for any given video. Previous approaches only utilize single-frame features for the detection, segmentation, and tracking of objects and they suffer in the video scenario due to several distinct challenges such as motion blur and drastic appearance change. To eliminate ambiguities introduced by only using single-frame features, we propose a novel comprehensive feature aggregation approach (CompFeat) to refine features atboth frame-level and object-level with temporal and spatial context information. The aggregation process is carefully designed with a new attention mechanism which significantly increases the discriminative power of the learned features. We further improve the tracking capability of our model through a siamese design by incorporating both feature similarities and spatial similarities. Experiments conducted on the YouTube-VIS dataset validate the effectiveness of proposed CompFeat.

CompFeat: Comprehensive Feature Aggregation for Video Instance Segmentation

Many measurements or observations in computer vision and machine learning manifest as non-Euclidean data. While recent proposals (like spherical CNN) have extended a number of deep neural network architectures to manifold-valued data, and this has often provided strong improvements in performance, the literature on generative models for manifold data is quite sparse. Partly due to this gap, there are also no modality transfer/translation models for manifold-valued data whereas numerous such methods based on generative models are available for natural images. This paper addresses this gap, motivated by a need in brain imaging -- in doing so, we expand the operating range of certain generative models (as well as generative models for modality transfer) from natural images to images with manifold-valued measurements. Our main result is the design of a two-stream version of GLOW (flow-based invertible generative models) that can synthesize information of a field of one type of manifold-valued measurements given another. On the theoretical side, we introduce three kinds of invertible layers for manifold-valued data, which are not only analogous to their functionality in flow-based generative models (e.g., GLOW) but also preserve the key benefits (determinants of the Jacobian are easy to calculate). For experiments, on a large dataset from the Human Connectome Project (HCP), we show promising results where we can reliably and accurately reconstruct brain images of a field of orientation distribution functions (ODF) from diffusion tensor images (DTI), where the latter has a 5Ã— faster acquisition time but at the expense of worse angular resolution.

Flow-Based Generative Models for Learning Manifold to Manifold Mappings

Point cloud provides a compact and flexible representation for 3D shapes and recently attracts more and more attention due to the increasing demands in practical applications. The major challenge of handling such irregular data is how to achieve the permutation invariance of points in the input. Most of existing methods extract local descriptors that encode the geometry of local structure, followed by a symmetric function to form a global representation. The max pooling usually serves as the symmetric function and shows slight superiority compared to the average pooling. We argue that some discrimination information is inevitably missing when applying the max pooling across all local descriptors. In this paper, we propose the BoW pooling, a plug-and-play unit to substitute the max pooling. Our BoW pooling analyzes the set of local descriptors statistically and generates a histogram that reflects how the primitives in the dictionary constitute the overall geometry. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed Bow pooling is efficient to improve the performance in point cloud classification, shape retrieval and segmentation tasks and outperforms other existing symmetric functions.

BoW Pooling: A Plug-and-Play Unit for Feature Aggregation of Point Clouds

Integrated recommendation aims to jointly recommend heterogeneous items in the main feed from different sources via multiple channels, which needs to capture user preferences on both item and channel levels. It has been widely used in practical systems by billions of users, while few works concentrate on the integrated recommendation systematically. In this work, we propose a novel Hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for integrated recommendation (HRL-Rec), which divides the integrated recommendation into two tasks to recommend channels and items sequentially. The low-level agent is a channel selector, which generates a personalized channel list. The high-level agent is an item recommender, which recommends specific items from heterogeneous channels under the channel constraints. We design various rewards for both recommendation accuracy and diversity,  and propose four losses for fast and stable model convergence. We also conduct an online exploration for sufficient training. In experiments, we conduct extensive offline and online experiments on a billion-level real-world dataset to show the effectiveness of HRL-Rec. HRL-Rec has also been deployed on WeChat Top Stories, affecting millions of users. The source codes are released in https://github.com/modriczhang/HRL-Rec.

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