Motion planning and control in autonomous car racing are one of the most challenging and safety-critical tasks due to high speed and dynamism. The lower-level control nodes are expected to be highly optimized due to resource constraints of onboard embedded processing units, although there are strict latency requirements. Some of these guarantees can be provided at the application level, such as using ROS2's Real-Time executors. However, the performance can be far from satisfactory as many modern control algorithms (such as Model Predictive Control) rely on solving complicated online optimization problems at each iteration. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective multi-threading technique to optimize the throughput of online-control algorithms for resource-constrained autonomous racing platforms. We achieve this by maintaining a systematic pool of worker threads solving the optimization problem in parallel which can improve the system performance by reducing latency between control input commands. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our method using the Model Predictive Contouring Control (MPCC) algorithm running on Nvidia's Xavier AGX platform.

实时机器学习检测算法通常在自动驾驶汽车技术中发现，并依赖优质数据集。这些算法在日常条件以及强烈的阳光下都能正常工作。报告表明，眩光是撞车事故最突出的两个最突出的原因之一。但是，现有的数据集，例如LISA和德国交通标志识别基准，根本不反映Sun Glare的存在。本文介绍了眩光交通标志数据集：在阳光下重大视觉干扰下，具有基于美国的交通标志的图像集合。眩光包含2,157张带有阳光眩光的交通标志图像，从33个美国道路录像带中拉出。它为广泛使用的Lisa流量标志数据集提供了必不可少的丰富。我们的实验研究表明，尽管几种最先进的基线方法在没有太阳眩光的情况下对交通符号数据集进行了训练和测试，但在对眩光进行测试时，它们遭受了极大的痛苦（例如，9％至21％的平均图范围为9％至21％。 ，它明显低于LISA数据集上的性能）。我们还注意到，当对Sun Glare中的交通标志图像进行培训时，当前的架构具有更好的检测准确性（例如，主流算法平均42％的平均地图增益）。

时间序列模型通常处理极端事件和异常，这两者都在现实世界数据集中普遍存在。这样的模型通常需要提供仔细的概率预测，这对于诸如飓风和大流行等极端事件的风险管理至关重要。但是，自动检测并学习对大规模数据集使用极端事件和异常，这是一项挑战，这通常需要手动努力。因此，我们提出了一个异常的预测框架，该框架利用了先前看到的异常作用来提高其在极端事件存在期间和之后的预测准确性。具体而言，该框架会自动提取异常，并通过注意机制将其合并，以提高其未来极端事件的准确性。此外，该框架采用动态不确定性优化算法，以在线方式降低预测的不确定性。所提出的框架表现出一致的卓越精度，而在三个数据集上，与当前预测模型相比，三个具有不同异常的数据集的不确定性。

变压器已被广泛应用于文本分类。不幸的是，现实世界中的数据包含异常和嘈杂的标签，这些标签对最先进的变压器造成了挑战。本文提出了Protoformer，这是一种针对变压器的新型自学习框架，可以利用有问题的样本进行文本分类。原型类型具有嵌入样品的选择机制，使我们能够有效提取和利用异常原型和困难的类原型。我们在具有不同文本结构的数据集上演示了此类功能（例如Twitter，IMDB，Arxiv）。我们还将该框架应用于多个模型。结果表明，原构物可以改善各种经验环境中的电流变压器。

Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) remains challenging due to the diversity of distortion and image content variation, which complicate the distortion patterns crossing different scales and aggravate the difficulty of the regression problem for BIQA. However, existing BIQA methods often fail to consider multi-scale distortion patterns and image content, and little research has been done on learning strategies to make the regression model produce better performance. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Progressive Multi-Task Image Quality Assessment (PMT-IQA) model, which contains a multi-scale feature extraction module (MS) and a progressive multi-task learning module (PMT), to help the model learn complex distortion patterns and better optimize the regression issue to align with the law of human learning process from easy to hard. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed PMT-IQA model, we conduct experiments on four widely used public datasets, and the experimental results indicate that the performance of PMT-IQA is superior to the comparison approaches, and both MS and PMT modules improve the model's performance.

It has been observed in practice that applying pruning-at-initialization methods to neural networks and training the sparsified networks can not only retain the testing performance of the original dense models, but also sometimes even slightly boost the generalization performance. Theoretical understanding for such experimental observations are yet to be developed. This work makes the first attempt to study how different pruning fractions affect the model's gradient descent dynamics and generalization. Specifically, this work considers a classification task for overparameterized two-layer neural networks, where the network is randomly pruned according to different rates at the initialization. It is shown that as long as the pruning fraction is below a certain threshold, gradient descent can drive the training loss toward zero and the network exhibits good generalization performance. More surprisingly, the generalization bound gets better as the pruning fraction gets larger. To complement this positive result, this work further shows a negative result: there exists a large pruning fraction such that while gradient descent is still able to drive the training loss toward zero (by memorizing noise), the generalization performance is no better than random guessing. This further suggests that pruning can change the feature learning process, which leads to the performance drop of the pruned neural network. Up to our knowledge, this is the \textbf{first} generalization result for pruned neural networks, suggesting that pruning can improve the neural network's generalization.

Time-series anomaly detection is an important task and has been widely applied in the industry. Since manual data annotation is expensive and inefficient, most applications adopt unsupervised anomaly detection methods, but the results are usually sub-optimal and unsatisfactory to end customers. Weak supervision is a promising paradigm for obtaining considerable labels in a low-cost way, which enables the customers to label data by writing heuristic rules rather than annotating each instance individually. However, in the time-series domain, it is hard for people to write reasonable labeling functions as the time-series data is numerically continuous and difficult to be understood. In this paper, we propose a Label-Efficient Interactive Time-Series Anomaly Detection (LEIAD) system, which enables a user to improve the results of unsupervised anomaly detection by performing only a small amount of interactions with the system. To achieve this goal, the system integrates weak supervision and active learning collaboratively while generating labeling functions automatically using only a few labeled data. All of these techniques are complementary and can promote each other in a reinforced manner. We conduct experiments on three time-series anomaly detection datasets, demonstrating that the proposed system is superior to existing solutions in both weak supervision and active learning areas. Also, the system has been tested in a real scenario in industry to show its practicality.

As an important variant of entity alignment (EA), multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA) aims to discover identical entities across different knowledge graphs (KGs) with multiple modalities like images. However, current MMEA algorithms all adopt KG-level modality fusion strategies but ignore modality differences among individual entities, hurting the robustness to potential noise involved in modalities (e.g., unidentifiable images and relations). In this paper we present MEAformer, a multi-modal entity alignment transformer approach for meta modality hybrid, to dynamically predict the mutual correlation coefficients among modalities for instance-level feature fusion. A modal-aware hard entity replay strategy is also proposed for addressing vague entity details. Extensive experimental results show that our model not only achieves SOTA performance on multiple training scenarios including supervised, unsupervised, iterative, and low resource, but also has limited parameters, optimistic speed, and good interpretability. Our code will be available soon.

The task of video prediction and generation is known to be notoriously difficult, with the research in this area largely limited to short-term predictions. Though plagued with noise and stochasticity, videos consist of features that are organised in a spatiotemporal hierarchy, different features possessing different temporal dynamics. In this paper, we introduce Dynamic Latent Hierarchy (DLH) -- a deep hierarchical latent model that represents videos as a hierarchy of latent states that evolve over separate and fluid timescales. Each latent state is a mixture distribution with two components, representing the immediate past and the predicted future, causing the model to learn transitions only between sufficiently dissimilar states, while clustering temporally persistent states closer together. Using this unique property, DLH naturally discovers the spatiotemporal structure of a dataset and learns disentangled representations across its hierarchy. We hypothesise that this simplifies the task of modeling temporal dynamics of a video, improves the learning of long-term dependencies, and reduces error accumulation. As evidence, we demonstrate that DLH outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks in video prediction, is able to better represent stochasticity, as well as to dynamically adjust its hierarchical and temporal structure. Our paper shows, among other things, how progress in representation learning can translate into progress in prediction tasks.

Implicit regularization is an important way to interpret neural networks. Recent theory starts to explain implicit regularization with the model of deep matrix factorization (DMF) and analyze the trajectory of discrete gradient dynamics in the optimization process. These discrete gradient dynamics are relatively small but not infinitesimal, thus fitting well with the practical implementation of neural networks. Currently, discrete gradient dynamics analysis has been successfully applied to shallow networks but encounters the difficulty of complex computation for deep networks. In this work, we introduce another discrete gradient dynamics approach to explain implicit regularization, i.e. landscape analysis. It mainly focuses on gradient regions, such as saddle points and local minima. We theoretically establish the connection between saddle point escaping (SPE) stages and the matrix rank in DMF. We prove that, for a rank-R matrix reconstruction, DMF will converge to a second-order critical point after R stages of SPE. This conclusion is further experimentally verified on a low-rank matrix reconstruction problem. This work provides a new theory to analyze implicit regularization in deep learning.