Dynamic movement primitives are widely used for learning skills which can be demonstrated to a robot by a skilled human or controller. While their generalization capabilities and simple formulation make them very appealing to use, they possess no strong guarantees to satisfy operational safety constraints for a task. In this paper, we present constrained dynamic movement primitives (CDMP) which can allow for constraint satisfaction in the robot workspace. We present a formulation of a non-linear optimization to perturb the DMP forcing weights regressed by locally-weighted regression to admit a Zeroing Barrier Function (ZBF), which certifies workspace constraint satisfaction. We demonstrate the proposed CDMP under different constraints on the end-effector movement such as obstacle avoidance and workspace constraints on a physical robot. A video showing the implementation of the proposed algorithm using different manipulators in different environments could be found here https://youtu.be/hJegJJkJfys.

Despite its importance for federated learning, continuous learning and many other applications, on-device training remains an open problem for EdgeAI. The problem stems from the large number of operations (e.g., floating point multiplications and additions) and memory consumption required during training by the back-propagation algorithm. Consequently, in this paper, we propose a new gradient filtering approach which enables on-device DNN model training. More precisely, our approach creates a special structure with fewer unique elements in the gradient map, thus significantly reducing the computational complexity and memory consumption of back propagation during training. Extensive experiments on image classification and semantic segmentation with multiple DNN models (e.g., MobileNet, DeepLabV3, UPerNet) and devices (e.g., Raspberry Pi and Jetson Nano) demonstrate the effectiveness and wide applicability of our approach. For example, compared to SOTA, we achieve up to 19$\times$ speedup and 77.1% memory savings on ImageNet classification with only 0.1% accuracy loss. Finally, our method is easy to implement and deploy; over 20$\times$ speedup and 90% energy savings have been observed compared to highly optimized baselines in MKLDNN and CUDNN on NVIDIA Jetson Nano. Consequently, our approach opens up a new direction of research with a huge potential for on-device training.

We present a novel corpus for French dialect identification comprising 413,522 French text samples collected from public news websites in Belgium, Canada, France and Switzerland. To ensure an accurate estimation of the dialect identification performance of models, we designed the corpus to eliminate potential biases related to topic, writing style, and publication source. More precisely, the training, validation and test splits are collected from different news websites, while searching for different keywords (topics). This leads to a French cross-domain (FreCDo) dialect identification task. We conduct experiments with four competitive baselines, a fine-tuned CamemBERT model, an XGBoost based on fine-tuned CamemBERT features, a Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifier based on fine-tuned CamemBERT features, and an SVM based on word n-grams. Aside from presenting quantitative results, we also make an analysis of the most discriminative features learned by CamemBERT. Our corpus is available at https://github.com/MihaelaGaman/FreCDo.

Text-guided image editing can have a transformative impact in supporting creative applications. A key challenge is to generate edits that are faithful to input text prompts, while consistent with input images. We present Imagen Editor, a cascaded diffusion model built, by fine-tuning Imagen on text-guided image inpainting. Imagen Editor's edits are faithful to the text prompts, which is accomplished by using object detectors to propose inpainting masks during training. In addition, Imagen Editor captures fine details in the input image by conditioning the cascaded pipeline on the original high resolution image. To improve qualitative and quantitative evaluation, we introduce EditBench, a systematic benchmark for text-guided image inpainting. EditBench evaluates inpainting edits on natural and generated images exploring objects, attributes, and scenes. Through extensive human evaluation on EditBench, we find that object-masking during training leads to across-the-board improvements in text-image alignment -- such that Imagen Editor is preferred over DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion -- and, as a cohort, these models are better at object-rendering than text-rendering, and handle material/color/size attributes better than count/shape attributes.

Depth cues are known to be useful for visual perception. However, direct measurement of depth is often impracticable. Fortunately, though, modern learning-based methods offer promising depth maps by inference in the wild. In this work, we adapt such depth inference models for object segmentation using the objects' ``pop-out'' prior in 3D. The ``pop-out'' is a simple composition prior that assumes objects reside on the background surface. Such compositional prior allows us to reason about objects in the 3D space. More specifically, we adapt the inferred depth maps such that objects can be localized using only 3D information. Such separation, however, requires knowledge about contact surface which we learn using the weak supervision of the segmentation mask. Our intermediate representation of contact surface, and thereby reasoning about objects purely in 3D, allows us to better transfer the depth knowledge into semantics. The proposed adaptation method uses only the depth model without needing the source data used for training, making the learning process efficient and practical. Our experiments on eight datasets of two challenging tasks, namely camouflaged object detection and salient object detection, consistently demonstrate the benefit of our method in terms of both performance and generalizability.

Can we leverage the audiovisual information already present in video to improve self-supervised representation learning? To answer this question, we study various pretraining architectures and objectives within the masked autoencoding framework, motivated by the success of similar methods in natural language and image understanding. We show that we can achieve significant improvements on audiovisual downstream classification tasks, surpassing the state-of-the-art on VGGSound and AudioSet. Furthermore, we can leverage our audiovisual pretraining scheme for multiple unimodal downstream tasks using a single audiovisual pretrained model. We additionally demonstrate the transferability of our representations, achieving state-of-the-art audiovisual results on Epic Kitchens without pretraining specifically for this dataset.

Learning continuous image representations is recently gaining popularity for image super-resolution (SR) because of its ability to reconstruct high-resolution images with arbitrary scales from low-resolution inputs. Existing methods mostly ensemble nearby features to predict the new pixel at any queried coordinate in the SR image. Such a local ensemble suffers from some limitations: i) it has no learnable parameters and it neglects the similarity of the visual features; ii) it has a limited receptive field and cannot ensemble relevant features in a large field which are important in an image; iii) it inherently has a gap with real camera imaging since it only depends on the coordinate. To address these issues, this paper proposes a continuous implicit attention-in-attention network, called CiaoSR. We explicitly design an implicit attention network to learn the ensemble weights for the nearby local features. Furthermore, we embed a scale-aware attention in this implicit attention network to exploit additional non-local information. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate CiaoSR significantly outperforms the existing single image super resolution (SISR) methods with the same backbone. In addition, the proposed method also achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the arbitrary-scale SR task. The effectiveness of the method is also demonstrated on the real-world SR setting. More importantly, CiaoSR can be flexibly integrated into any backbone to improve the SR performance.

Neural information retrieval (IR) systems have progressed rapidly in recent years, in large part due to the release of publicly available benchmarking tasks. Unfortunately, some dimensions of this progress are illusory: the majority of the popular IR benchmarks today focus exclusively on downstream task accuracy and thus conceal the costs incurred by systems that trade away efficiency for quality. Latency, hardware cost, and other efficiency considerations are paramount to the deployment of IR systems in user-facing settings. We propose that IR benchmarks structure their evaluation methodology to include not only metrics of accuracy, but also efficiency considerations such as a query latency and the corresponding cost budget for a reproducible hardware setting. For the popular IR benchmarks MS MARCO and XOR-TyDi, we show how the best choice of IR system varies according to how these efficiency considerations are chosen and weighed. We hope that future benchmarks will adopt these guidelines toward more holistic IR evaluation.

Blind image super-resolution (Blind-SR) aims to recover a high-resolution (HR) image from its corresponding low-resolution (LR) input image with unknown degradations. Most of the existing works design an explicit degradation estimator for each degradation to guide SR. However, it is infeasible to provide concrete labels of multiple degradation combinations (\eg, blur, noise, jpeg compression) to supervise the degradation estimator training. In addition, these special designs for certain degradation, such as blur, impedes the models from being generalized to handle different degradations. To this end, it is necessary to design an implicit degradation estimator that can extract discriminative degradation representation for all degradations without relying on the supervision of degradation ground-truth. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge Distillation based Blind-SR network (KDSR). It consists of a knowledge distillation based implicit degradation estimator network (KD-IDE) and an efficient SR network. To learn the KDSR model, we first train a teacher network: KD-IDE$_{T}$. It takes paired HR and LR patches as inputs and is optimized with the SR network jointly. Then, we further train a student network KD-IDE$_{S}$, which only takes LR images as input and learns to extract the same implicit degradation representation (IDR) as KD-IDE$_{T}$. In addition, to fully use extracted IDR, we design a simple, strong, and efficient IDR based dynamic convolution residual block (IDR-DCRB) to build an SR network. We conduct extensive experiments under classic and real-world degradation settings. The results show that KDSR achieves SOTA performance and can generalize to various degradation processes. The source codes and pre-trained models will be released.

We propose a very fast frame-level model for anomaly detection in video, which learns to detect anomalies by distilling knowledge from multiple highly accurate object-level teacher models. To improve the fidelity of our student, we distill the low-resolution anomaly maps of the teachers by jointly applying standard and adversarial distillation, introducing an adversarial discriminator for each teacher to distinguish between target and generated anomaly maps. We conduct experiments on three benchmarks (Avenue, ShanghaiTech, UCSD Ped2), showing that our method is over 7 times faster than the fastest competing method, and between 28 and 62 times faster than object-centric models, while obtaining comparable results to recent methods. Our evaluation also indicates that our model achieves the best trade-off between speed and accuracy, due to its previously unheard-of speed of 1480 FPS. In addition, we carry out a comprehensive ablation study to justify our architectural design choices.