Fusing the camera and LiDAR information has become a de-facto standard for 3D object detection tasks. Current methods rely on point clouds from the LiDAR sensor as queries to leverage the feature from the image space. However, people discovered that this underlying assumption makes the current fusion framework infeasible to produce any prediction when there is a LiDAR malfunction, regardless of minor or major. This fundamentally limits the deployment capability to realistic autonomous driving scenarios. In contrast, we propose a surprisingly simple yet novel fusion framework, dubbed BEVFusion, whose camera stream does not depend on the input of LiDAR data, thus addressing the downside of previous methods. We empirically show that our framework surpasses the state-of-the-art methods under the normal training settings. Under the robustness training settings that simulate various LiDAR malfunctions, our framework significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art methods by 15.7% to 28.9% mAP. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to handle realistic LiDAR malfunction and can be deployed to realistic scenarios without any post-processing procedure. The code is available at https://github.com/ADLab-AutoDrive/BEVFusion.

In this work, we focus on instance-level open vocabulary segmentation, intending to expand a segmenter for instance-wise novel categories without mask annotations. We investigate a simple yet effective framework with the help of image captions, focusing on exploiting thousands of object nouns in captions to discover instances of novel classes. Rather than adopting pretrained caption models or using massive caption datasets with complex pipelines, we propose an end-to-end solution from two aspects: caption grounding and caption generation. In particular, we devise a joint Caption Grounding and Generation (CGG) framework based on a Mask Transformer baseline. The framework has a novel grounding loss that performs explicit and implicit multi-modal feature alignments. We further design a lightweight caption generation head to allow for additional caption supervision. We find that grounding and generation complement each other, significantly enhancing the segmentation performance for novel categories. We conduct extensive experiments on the COCO dataset with two settings: Open Vocabulary Instance Segmentation (OVIS) and Open Set Panoptic Segmentation (OSPS). The results demonstrate the superiority of our CGG framework over previous OVIS methods, achieving a large improvement of 6.8% mAP on novel classes without extra caption data. Our method also achieves over 15% PQ improvements for novel classes on the OSPS benchmark under various settings.

Recent studies have shown that using an external Language Model (LM) benefits the end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, predicting tokens that appear less frequently in the training set is still quite challenging. The long-tail prediction problems have been widely studied in many applications, but only been addressed by a few studies for ASR and LMs. In this paper, we propose a new memory augmented lookup dictionary based Transformer architecture for LM. The newly introduced lookup dictionary incorporates rich contextual information in training set, which is vital to correctly predict long-tail tokens. With intensive experiments on Chinese and English data sets, our proposed method is proved to outperform the baseline Transformer LM by a great margin on both word/character error rate and tail tokens error rate. This is achieved without impact on the decoding efficiency. Overall, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in boosting the ASR decoding performance, especially for long-tail tokens.

It is crucial to evaluate the quality and determine the optimal number of clusters in cluster analysis. In this paper, the multi-granularity characterization of the data set is carried out to obtain the hyper-balls. The cluster internal evaluation index based on hyper-balls(HCVI) is defined. Moreover, a general method for determining the optimal number of clusters based on HCVI is proposed. The proposed methods can evaluate the clustering results produced by the several classic methods and determine the optimal cluster number for data sets containing noises and clusters with arbitrary shapes. The experimental results on synthetic and real data sets indicate that the new index outperforms existing ones.

Generalizability to unseen forgery types is crucial for face forgery detectors. Recent works have made significant progress in terms of generalization by synthetic forgery data augmentation. In this work, we explore another path for improving the generalization. Our goal is to reduce the features that are easy to learn in the training phase, so as to reduce the risk of overfitting on specific forgery types. Specifically, in our method, a teacher network takes as input the face images and generates an attention map of the deep features by a diverse multihead attention ViT. The attention map is used to guide a student network to focus on the low-attended features by reducing the highly-attended deep features. A deep feature mixup strategy is also proposed to synthesize forgeries in the feature domain. Experiments demonstrate that, without data augmentation, our method is able to achieve promising performances on unseen forgeries and highly compressed data.

This paper presents a safety-critical locomotion control framework for quadrupedal robots. Our goal is to enable quadrupedal robots to safely navigate in cluttered environments. To tackle this, we introduce exponential Discrete Control Barrier Functions (exponential DCBFs) with duality-based obstacle avoidance constraints into a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) with Whole-Body Control (WBC) framework for quadrupedal locomotion control. This enables us to use polytopes to describe the shapes of the robot and obstacles for collision avoidance while doing locomotion control of quadrupedal robots. Compared to most prior work, especially using CBFs, that utilize spherical and conservative approximation for obstacle avoidance, this work demonstrates a quadrupedal robot autonomously and safely navigating through very tight spaces in the real world. (Our open-source code is available at github.com/HybridRobotics/quadruped_nmpc_dcbf_duality, and the video is available at youtu.be/p1gSQjwXm1Q.)

This paper presents a novel framework for planning in unknown and occluded urban spaces. We specifically focus on turns and intersections where occlusions significantly impact navigability. Our approach uses an inpainting model to fill in a sparse, occluded, semantic lidar point cloud and plans dynamically feasible paths for a vehicle to traverse through the open and inpainted spaces. We demonstrate our approach using a car's lidar data with real-time occlusions, and show that by inpainting occluded areas, we can plan longer paths, with more turn options compared to without inpainting; in addition, our approach more closely follows paths derived from a planner with no occlusions (called the ground truth) compared to other state of the art approaches.

In this work, we investigate improving the generalizability of GAN-generated image detectors by performing data augmentation in the fingerprint domain. Specifically, we first separate the fingerprints and contents of the GAN-generated images using an autoencoder based GAN fingerprint extractor, followed by random perturbations of the fingerprints. Then the original fingerprints are substituted with the perturbed fingerprints and added to the original contents, to produce images that are visually invariant but with distinct fingerprints. The perturbed images can successfully imitate images generated by different GANs to improve the generalization of the detectors, which is demonstrated by the spectra visualization. To our knowledge, we are the first to conduct data augmentation in the fingerprint domain. Our work explores a novel prospect that is distinct from previous works on spatial and frequency domain augmentation. Extensive cross-GAN experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method compared to the state-of-the-art methods in detecting fake images generated by unknown GANs.

The rapid development of remote sensing technologies have gained significant attention due to their ability to accurately localize, classify, and segment objects from aerial images. These technologies are commonly used in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with high-resolution cameras or sensors to capture data over large areas. This data is useful for various applications, such as monitoring and inspecting cities, towns, and terrains. In this paper, we presented a method for classifying and segmenting city road traffic dashed lines from aerial images using deep learning models such as U-Net and SegNet. The annotated data is used to train these models, which are then used to classify and segment the aerial image into two classes: dashed lines and non-dashed lines. However, the deep learning model may not be able to identify all dashed lines due to poor painting or occlusion by trees or shadows. To address this issue, we proposed a method to add missed lines to the segmentation output. We also extracted the x and y coordinates of each dashed line from the segmentation output, which can be used by city planners to construct a CAD file for digital visualization of the roads.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have received remarkable success in link prediction (GNNLP) tasks. Existing efforts first predefine the subgraph for the whole dataset and then apply GNNs to encode edge representations by leveraging the neighborhood structure induced by the fixed subgraph. The prominence of GNNLP methods significantly relies on the adhoc subgraph. Since node connectivity in real-world graphs is complex, one shared subgraph is limited for all edges. Thus, the choices of subgraphs should be personalized to different edges. However, performing personalized subgraph selection is nontrivial since the potential selection space grows exponentially to the scale of edges. Besides, the inference edges are not available during training in link prediction scenarios, so the selection process needs to be inductive. To bridge the gap, we introduce a Personalized Subgraph Selector (PS2) as a plug-and-play framework to automatically, personally, and inductively identify optimal subgraphs for different edges when performing GNNLP. PS2 is instantiated as a bi-level optimization problem that can be efficiently solved differently. Coupling GNNLP models with PS2, we suggest a brand-new angle towards GNNLP training: by first identifying the optimal subgraphs for edges; and then focusing on training the inference model by using the sampled subgraphs. Comprehensive experiments endorse the effectiveness of our proposed method across various GNNLP backbones (GCN, GraphSage, NGCF, LightGCN, and SEAL) and diverse benchmarks (Planetoid, OGB, and Recommendation datasets). Our code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/qiaoyu-tan/PS2}