We propose a new self-supervised method for pre-training the backbone of deep perception models operating on point clouds. The core idea is to train the model on a pretext task which is the reconstruction of the surface on which the 3D points are sampled, and to use the underlying latent vectors as input to the perception head. The intuition is that if the network is able to reconstruct the scene surface, given only sparse input points, then it probably also captures some fragments of semantic information, that can be used to boost an actual perception task. This principle has a very simple formulation, which makes it both easy to implement and widely applicable to a large range of 3D sensors and deep networks performing semantic segmentation or object detection. In fact, it supports a single-stream pipeline, as opposed to most contrastive learning approaches, allowing training on limited resources. We conducted extensive experiments on various autonomous driving datasets, involving very different kinds of lidars, for both semantic segmentation and object detection. The results show the effectiveness of our method to learn useful representations without any annotation, compared to existing approaches. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/valeoai/ALSO}{github.com/valeoai/ALSO}

隐式神经网络已成功用于点云的表面重建。然而，它们中的许多人面临着可扩展性问题，因为它们将整个对象或场景的异构面功能编码为单个潜在载体。为了克服这种限制，一些方法在粗略普通的3D网格或3D补丁上推断潜伏向量，并将它们插入以应对占用查询。在这样做时，它们可以与对象表面上采样的输入点进行直接连接，并且它们在空间中均匀地附加信息，而不是其最重要的信息，即在表面附近。此外，依赖于固定的补丁大小可能需要离散化调整。要解决这些问题，我们建议使用点云卷积并计算每个输入点的潜伏向量。然后，我们使用推断的权重在最近的邻居上执行基于学习的插值。对象和场景数据集的实验表明，我们的方法在大多数古典指标上显着优于其他方法，产生更精细的细节和更好的重建更薄的卷。代码可在https://github.com/valeoai/poco获得。

从众包标签或公开的数据创建的大规模数据集已经至关重要，为大规模学习算法提供培训数据。虽然这些数据集更容易获取，但数据经常嘈杂和不可靠，这是对弱监督学习技术的激励研究。在本文中，我们提出了原始想法，帮助我们在变更检测的背景下利用此类数据集。首先，我们提出了引导的各向异性扩散（GAD）算法，其使用输入图像改善语义分割结果作为执行边缘保留滤波的引导件。然后，我们展示了它在改变检测中量身定制的两个弱监督的学习策略中的潜力。第一策略是一种迭代学习方法，它将模型优化和数据清理使用GAD从开放矢量数据生成的大规模改变检测数据集中提取有用信息。第二个在新的空间注意层内包含GAD，其增加训练训练的弱监管网络的准确性，以从图像级标签执行像素级预测。在4个不同的公共数据集上展示了关于最先进的最先进的改进。

最近对隐含形状表示的兴趣日益增长。与明确的陈述相反，他们没有解决局限性，他们很容易处理各种各样的表面拓扑。为了了解这些隐式表示，电流方法依赖于一定程度的形状监督（例如，内部/外部信息或距离形状知识），或者至少需要密集点云（以近似距离 - 到 - 到 - 形状）。相比之下，我们介绍{\方法}，一种用于学习形状表示的自我监督方法，从可能极其稀疏的点云。就像在水牛的针问题一样，我们在点云上“掉落”（样本）针头，认为，静统计地靠近表面，针端点位于表面的相对侧。不需要形状知识，点云可以高稀疏，例如，作为车辆获取的Lidar点云。以前的自我监督形状表示方法未能在这种数据上产生良好的结果。我们获得定量结果与现有的形状重建数据集上现有的监督方法标准，并在Kitti等硬自动驾驶数据集中显示有前途的定性结果。

虽然对2D图像的零射击学习（ZSL）进行了许多研究，但其在3D数据中的应用仍然是最近且稀缺的，只有几种方法限于分类。我们在3D数据上介绍了ZSL和广义ZSL（GZSL）的第一代生成方法，可以处理分类，并且是第一次语义分割。我们表明它达到或胜过了INTEMNET40对归纳ZSL和归纳GZSL的ModelNet40分类的最新状态。对于语义分割，我们创建了三个基准，用于评估此新ZSL任务，使用S3DIS，Scannet和Semantickitti进行评估。我们的实验表明，我们的方法优于强大的基线，我们另外为此任务提出。

Real-world robotic grasping can be done robustly if a complete 3D Point Cloud Data (PCD) of an object is available. However, in practice, PCDs are often incomplete when objects are viewed from few and sparse viewpoints before the grasping action, leading to the generation of wrong or inaccurate grasp poses. We propose a novel grasping strategy, named 3DSGrasp, that predicts the missing geometry from the partial PCD to produce reliable grasp poses. Our proposed PCD completion network is a Transformer-based encoder-decoder network with an Offset-Attention layer. Our network is inherently invariant to the object pose and point's permutation, which generates PCDs that are geometrically consistent and completed properly. Experiments on a wide range of partial PCD show that 3DSGrasp outperforms the best state-of-the-art method on PCD completion tasks and largely improves the grasping success rate in real-world scenarios. The code and dataset will be made available upon acceptance.

Model estimates obtained from traditional subspace identification methods may be subject to significant variance. This elevated variance is aggravated in the cases of large models or of a limited sample size. Common solutions to reduce the effect of variance are regularized estimators, shrinkage estimators and Bayesian estimation. In the current work we investigate the latter two solutions, which have not yet been applied to subspace identification. Our experimental results show that our proposed estimators may reduce the estimation risk up to $40\%$ of that of traditional subspace methods.

This report summarizes the work carried out by the authors during the Twelfth Montreal Industrial Problem Solving Workshop, held at Universit\'e de Montr\'eal in August 2022. The team tackled a problem submitted by CBC/Radio-Canada on the theme of Automatic Text Simplification (ATS).

Counterfactual explanation is a common class of methods to make local explanations of machine learning decisions. For a given instance, these methods aim to find the smallest modification of feature values that changes the predicted decision made by a machine learning model. One of the challenges of counterfactual explanation is the efficient generation of realistic counterfactuals. To address this challenge, we propose VCNet-Variational Counter Net-a model architecture that combines a predictor and a counterfactual generator that are jointly trained, for regression or classification tasks. VCNet is able to both generate predictions, and to generate counterfactual explanations without having to solve another minimisation problem. Our contribution is the generation of counterfactuals that are close to the distribution of the predicted class. This is done by learning a variational autoencoder conditionally to the output of the predictor in a join-training fashion. We present an empirical evaluation on tabular datasets and across several interpretability metrics. The results are competitive with the state-of-the-art method.

Foundation models are redefining how AI systems are built. Practitioners now follow a standard procedure to build their machine learning solutions: download a copy of a foundation model, and fine-tune it using some in-house data about the target task of interest. Consequently, the Internet is swarmed by a handful of foundation models fine-tuned on many diverse tasks. Yet, these individual fine-tunings often lack strong generalization and exist in isolation without benefiting from each other. In our opinion, this is a missed opportunity, as these specialized models contain diverse features. Based on this insight, we propose model recycling, a simple strategy that leverages multiple fine-tunings of the same foundation model on diverse auxiliary tasks, and repurposes them as rich and diverse initializations for the target task. Specifically, model recycling fine-tunes in parallel each specialized model on the target task, and then averages the weights of all target fine-tunings into a final model. Empirically, we show that model recycling maximizes model diversity by benefiting from diverse auxiliary tasks, and achieves a new state of the art on the reference DomainBed benchmark for out-of-distribution generalization. Looking forward, model recycling is a contribution to the emerging paradigm of updatable machine learning where, akin to open-source software development, the community collaborates to incrementally and reliably update machine learning models.