arXiv subjects

Hong Qiao

Publications and source records attributed to Hong Qiao.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Unseen Object Instance Segmentation with Fully Test-time RGB-D Embeddings Adaptation

Segmenting unseen objects is a crucial ability for the robot since it may encounter new environments during the operation. Recently, a popular solution is leveraging RGB-D features of large-scale synthetic data and directly applying the model to unseen real-world scenarios. However, the domain shift caused by the sim2real gap is inevitable, posing a crucial challenge to the segmentation model. In this paper, we emphasize the adaptation process across sim2real domains and model it as a learning problem on the BatchNorm parameters of a simulation-trained model. Specifically, we propose a novel non-parametric entropy objective, which formulates the learning objective for the test-time adaptation in an open-world manner. Then, a cross-modality knowledge distillation objective is further designed to encourage the test-time knowledge transfer for feature enhancement. Our approach can be efficiently implemented with only test images, without requiring annotations or revisiting the large-scale synthetic training data. Besides significant time savings, the proposed method consistently improves segmentation results on the overlap and boundary metrics, achieving state-of-the-art performance on unseen object instance segmentation.

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arXiv2023

Zero-shot object goal visual navigation

Object goal visual navigation is a challenging task that aims to guide a robot to find the target object based on its visual observation, and the target is limited to the classes pre-defined in the training stage. However, in real households, there may exist numerous target classes that the robot needs to deal with, and it is hard for all of these classes to be contained in the training stage. To address this challenge, we study the zero-shot object goal visual navigation task, which aims at guiding robots to find targets belonging to novel classes without any training samples. To this end, we also propose a novel zero-shot object navigation framework called semantic similarity network (SSNet). Our framework use the detection results and the cosine similarity between semantic word embeddings as input. Such type of input data has a weak correlation with classes and thus our framework has the ability to generalize the policy to novel classes. Extensive experiments on the AI2-THOR platform show that our model outperforms the baseline models in the zero-shot object navigation task, which proves the generalization ability of our model. Our code is available at: https://github.com/pioneer-innovation/Zero-Shot-Object-Navigation.

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arXiv2023

Developing a platform for linear mechanical quantum computing

Linear optical quantum computing provides a desirable approach to quantum computing, with a short list of required elements. The similarity between photons and phonons points to the interesting potential for linear mechanical quantum computing (LMQC), using phonons in place of photons. While single-phonon sources and detectors have been demonstrated, a phononic beamsplitter element remains an outstanding requirement. Here we demonstrate such an element, using two superconducting qubits to fully characterize a beamsplitter with single phonons. We further use the beamsplitter to demonstrate two-phonon interference, a requirement for two-qubit gates, completing the toolbox needed for LMQC. This advance brings linear quantum computing to a fully solid-state system, along with straightforward conversion between itinerant phonons and superconducting qubits.

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arXiv2022

Automatically Discovering Novel Visual Categories with Self-supervised Prototype Learning

This paper tackles the problem of novel category discovery (NCD), which aims to discriminate unknown categories in large-scale image collections. The NCD task is challenging due to the closeness to the real-world scenarios, where we have only encountered some partial classes and images. Unlike other works on the NCD, we leverage the prototypes to emphasize the importance of category discrimination and alleviate the issue of missing annotations of novel classes. Concretely, we propose a novel adaptive prototype learning method consisting of two main stages: prototypical representation learning and prototypical self-training. In the first stage, we obtain a robust feature extractor, which could serve for all images with base and novel categories. This ability of instance and category discrimination of the feature extractor is boosted by self-supervised learning and adaptive prototypes. In the second stage, we utilize the prototypes again to rectify offline pseudo labels and train a final parametric classifier for category clustering. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method with state-of-the-art performance.

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arXiv2022

Weakly Aligned Feature Fusion for Multimodal Object Detection

To achieve accurate and robust object detection in the real-world scenario, various forms of images are incorporated, such as color, thermal, and depth. However, multimodal data often suffer from the position shift problem, i.e., the image pair is not strictly aligned, making one object has different positions in different modalities. For the deep learning method, this problem makes it difficult to fuse multimodal features and puzzles the convolutional neural network (CNN) training. In this article, we propose a general multimodal detector named aligned region CNN (AR-CNN) to tackle the position shift problem. First, a region feature (RF) alignment module with adjacent similarity constraint is designed to consistently predict the position shift between two modalities and adaptively align the cross-modal RFs. Second, we propose a novel region of interest (RoI) jitter strategy to improve the robustness to unexpected shift patterns. Third, we present a new multimodal feature fusion method that selects the more reliable feature and suppresses the less useful one via feature reweighting. In addition, by locating bounding boxes in both modalities and building their relationships, we provide novel multimodal labeling named KAIST-Paired. Extensive experiments on 2-D and 3-D object detection, RGB-T, and RGB-D datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method.

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arXiv2021

Learning with Smooth Hinge Losses

Due to the non-smoothness of the Hinge loss in SVM, it is difficult to obtain a faster convergence rate with modern optimization algorithms. In this paper, we introduce two smooth Hinge losses $ψ_G(α;σ)$ and $ψ_M(α;σ)$ which are infinitely differentiable and converge to the Hinge loss uniformly in $α$ as $σ$ tends to $0$. By replacing the Hinge loss with these two smooth Hinge losses, we obtain two smooth support vector machines(SSVMs), respectively. Solving the SSVMs with the Trust Region Newton method (TRON) leads to two quadratically convergent algorithms. Experiments in text classification tasks show that the proposed SSVMs are effective in real-world applications. We also introduce a general smooth convex loss function to unify several commonly-used convex loss functions in machine learning. The general framework provides smooth approximation functions to non-smooth convex loss functions, which can be used to obtain smooth models that can be solved with faster convergent optimization algorithms.

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arXiv2021

A Minimax Probability Machine for Non-Decomposable Performance Measures

Imbalanced classification tasks are widespread in many real-world applications. For such classification tasks, in comparison with the accuracy rate, it is usually much more appropriate to use non-decomposable performance measures such as the Area Under the receiver operating characteristic Curve (AUC) and the $F_β$ measure as the classification criterion since the label class is imbalanced. On the other hand, the minimax probability machine is a popular method for binary classification problems and aims at learning a linear classifier by maximizing the accuracy rate, which makes it unsuitable to deal with imbalanced classification tasks. The purpose of this paper is to develop a new minimax probability machine for the $F_β$ measure, called MPMF, which can be used to deal with imbalanced classification tasks. A brief discussion is also given on how to extend the MPMF model for several other non-decomposable performance measures listed in the paper. To solve the MPMF model effectively, we derive its equivalent form which can then be solved by an alternating descent method to learn a linear classifier. Further, the kernel trick is employed to derive a nonlinear MPMF model to learn a nonlinear classifier. Several experiments on real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our new model.

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arXiv2021

A Bioinspired Retinal Neural Network for Accurately Extracting Small-Target Motion Information in Cluttered Backgrounds

Robust and accurate detection of small moving targets in cluttered moving backgrounds is a significant and challenging problem for robotic visual systems to perform search and tracking tasks. Inspired by the neural circuitry of elementary motion vision in the mammalian retina, this paper proposes a bioinspired retinal neural network based on a new neurodynamics-based temporal filtering and multiform 2-D spatial Gabor filtering. This model can estimate motion direction accurately via only two perpendicular spatiotemporal filtering signals, and respond to small targets of different sizes and velocities by adjusting the dendrite field size of the spatial filter. Meanwhile, an algorithm of directionally selective inhibition is proposed to suppress the target-like features in the moving background, which can reduce the influence of background motion effectively. Extensive synthetic and real-data experiments show that the proposed model works stably for small targets of a wider size and velocity range, and has better detection performance than other bioinspired models. Additionally, it can also extract the information of motion direction and motion energy accurately and rapidly.

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arXiv2021

A Bioinspired Approach-Sensitive Neural Network for Collision Detection in Cluttered and Dynamic Backgrounds

Rapid, accurate and robust detection of looming objects in cluttered moving backgrounds is a significant and challenging problem for robotic visual systems to perform collision detection and avoidance tasks. Inspired by the neural circuit of elementary motion vision in the mammalian retina, this paper proposes a bioinspired approach-sensitive neural network (ASNN) that contains three main contributions. Firstly, a direction-selective visual processing module is built based on the spatiotemporal energy framework, which can estimate motion direction accurately via only two mutually perpendicular spatiotemporal filtering channels. Secondly, a novel approach-sensitive neural network is modeled as a push-pull structure formed by ON and OFF pathways, which responds strongly to approaching motion while insensitivity to lateral motion. Finally, a method of directionally selective inhibition is introduced, which is able to suppress the translational backgrounds effectively. Extensive synthetic and real robotic experiments show that the proposed model is able to not only detect collision accurately and robustly in cluttered and dynamic backgrounds but also extract more collision information like position and direction, for guiding rapid decision making.

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arXiv2020

Long-distance tiny face detection based on enhanced YOLOv3 for unmanned system

Remote tiny face detection applied in unmanned system is a challeng-ing work. The detector cannot obtain sufficient context semantic information due to the relatively long distance. The received poor fine-grained features make the face detection less accurate and robust. To solve the problem of long-distance detection of tiny faces, we propose an enhanced network model (YOLOv3-C) based on the YOLOv3 algorithm for unmanned platform. In this model, we bring in multi-scale features from feature pyramid networks and make the features fu-sion to adjust prediction feature map of the output, which improves the sensitivity of the entire algorithm for tiny target faces. The enhanced model improves the accuracy of tiny face detection in the cases of long-distance and high-density crowds. The experimental evaluation results demonstrated the superior perfor-mance of the proposed YOLOv3-C in comparison with other relevant detectors in remote tiny face detection. It is worth mentioning that our proposed method achieves comparable performance with the state of the art YOLOv4[1] in the tiny face detection tasks.

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arXiv2020

FSD-10: A Dataset for Competitive Sports Content Analysis

Action recognition is an important and challenging problem in video analysis. Although the past decade has witnessed progress in action recognition with the development of deep learning, such process has been slow in competitive sports content analysis. To promote the research on action recognition from competitive sports video clips, we introduce a Figure Skating Dataset (FSD-10) for finegrained sports content analysis. To this end, we collect 1484 clips from the worldwide figure skating championships in 2017-2018, which consist of 10 different actions in men/ladies programs. Each clip is at a rate of 30 frames per second with resolution 1080 $\times$ 720. These clips are then annotated by experts in type, grade of execution, skater info, .etc. To build a baseline for action recognition in figure skating, we evaluate state-of-the-art action recognition methods on FSD-10. Motivated by the idea that domain knowledge is of great concern in sports field, we propose a keyframe based temporal segment network (KTSN) for classification and achieve remarkable performance. Experimental results demonstrate that FSD-10 is an ideal dataset for benchmarking action recognition algorithms, as it requires to accurately extract action motions rather than action poses. We hope FSD-10, which is designed to have a large collection of finegrained actions, can serve as a new challenge to develop more robust and advanced action recognition models.

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arXiv2019

Diagonal Entropy and Topological Phase Transitions in Extended Kitaev Chains

We investigate the diagonal entropy for ground states of the extended Kitaev chains with extensive pairing and hopping terms. The systems contain rich topological phases equivalently represented by topological invariant winding numbers and Majorana zero modes. Both the finite size scaling law and block scaling law of the diagonal entropy are studied, which indicates that the diagonal entropy demonstrates volume effect. The parameter of volume term is regarded as the diagonal entropy density, which can identify the critical points of symmetry-protected topological phase transitions efficiently in the studied models, even for those with higher winding numbers. The formulation of block scaling law and the capability of diagonal entropy density in detecting topological phase transitions are independent of the chosen bases. In order to manifest the advantage of diagonal entropy, we also calculate the global entanglement, which can not show clear signatures of the topological phase transitions. This work provides a new quantum-informatic approach to characterize the feature of the topologically ordered states and may motivate a deep understanding of the quantum coherence and diagonal entropy in various condensed matter systems.

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arXiv2019

Hierarchic Neighbors Embedding

Manifold learning now plays a very important role in machine learning and many relevant applications. Although its superior performance in dealing with nonlinear data distribution, data sparsity is always a thorny knot. There are few researches to well handle it in manifold learning. In this paper, we propose Hierarchic Neighbors Embedding (HNE), which enhance local connection by the hierarchic combination of neighbors. After further analyzing topological connection and reconstruction performance, three different versions of HNE are given. The experimental results show that our methods work well on both synthetic data and high-dimensional real-world tasks. HNE develops the outstanding advantages in dealing with general data. Furthermore, comparing with other popular manifold learning methods, the performance on sparse samples and weak-connected manifolds is better for HNE.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Compare Contact Model-based Control and Contact Model-free Learning: A Survey of Robotic Peg-in-hole Assembly Strategies

In this paper, we present an overview of robotic peg-in-hole assembly and analyze two main strategies: contact model-based and contact model-free strategies. More specifically, we first introduce the contact model control approaches, including contact state recognition and compliant control two steps. Additionally, we focus on a comprehensive analysis of the whole robotic assembly system. Second, without the contact state recognition process, we decompose the contact model-free learning algorithms into two main subfields: learning from demonstrations and learning from environments (mainly based on reinforcement learning). For each subfield, we survey the landmark studies and ongoing research to compare the different categories. We hope to strengthen the relation between these two research communities by revealing the underlying links. Ultimately, the remaining challenges and open questions in the field of robotic peg-in-hole assembly community is discussed. The promising directions and potential future work are also considered.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2018

Multi-view Laplacian Eigenmaps Based on Bag-of-Neighbors For RGBD Human Emotion Recognition

Human emotion recognition is an important direction in the field of biometric and information forensics. However, most existing human emotion research are based on the single RGB view. In this paper, we introduce a RGBD video-emotion dataset and a RGBD face-emotion dataset for research. To our best knowledge, this may be the first RGBD video-emotion dataset. We propose a new supervised nonlinear multi-view laplacian eigenmaps (MvLE) approach and a multihidden-layer out-of-sample network (MHON) for RGB-D humanemotion recognition. To get better representations of RGB view and depth view, MvLE is used to map the training set of both views from original space into the common subspace. As RGB view and depth view lie in different spaces, a new distance metric bag of neighbors (BON) used in MvLE can get the similar distributions of the two views. Finally, MHON is used to get the low-dimensional representations of test data and predict their labels. MvLE can deal with the cases that RGB view and depth view have different size of features, even different number of samples and classes. And our methods can be easily extended to more than two views. The experiment results indicate the effectiveness of our methods over some state-of-art methods.

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arXiv2018

Perceptual Visual Interactive Learning

Supervised learning methods are widely used in machine learning. However, the lack of labels in existing data limits the application of these technologies. Visual interactive learning (VIL) compared with computers can avoid semantic gap, and solve the labeling problem of small label quantity (SLQ) samples in a groundbreaking way. In order to fully understand the importance of VIL to the interaction process, we re-summarize the interactive learning related algorithms (e.g. clustering, classification, retrieval etc.) from the perspective of VIL. Note that, perception and cognition are two main visual processes of VIL. On this basis, we propose a perceptual visual interactive learning (PVIL) framework, which adopts gestalt principle to design interaction strategy and multi-dimensionality reduction (MDR) to optimize the process of visualization. The advantage of PVIL framework is that it combines computer's sensitivity of detailed features and human's overall understanding of global tasks. Experimental results validate that the framework is superior to traditional computer labeling methods (such as label propagation) in both accuracy and efficiency, which achieves significant classification results on dense distribution and sparse classes dataset.

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arXiv2017

Discriminatively Boosted Image Clustering with Fully Convolutional Auto-Encoders

Traditional image clustering methods take a two-step approach, feature learning and clustering, sequentially. However, recent research results demonstrated that combining the separated phases in a unified framework and training them jointly can achieve a better performance. In this paper, we first introduce fully convolutional auto-encoders for image feature learning and then propose a unified clustering framework to learn image representations and cluster centers jointly based on a fully convolutional auto-encoder and soft $k$-means scores. At initial stages of the learning procedure, the representations extracted from the auto-encoder may not be very discriminative for latter clustering. We address this issue by adopting a boosted discriminative distribution, where high score assignments are highlighted and low score ones are de-emphasized. With the gradually boosted discrimination, clustering assignment scores are discriminated and cluster purities are enlarged. Experiments on several vision benchmark datasets show that our methods can achieve a state-of-the-art performance.

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arXiv2017

A Fast and Compact Saliency Score Regression Network Based on Fully Convolutional Network

Visual saliency detection aims at identifying the most visually distinctive parts in an image, and serves as a pre-processing step for a variety of computer vision and image processing tasks. To this end, the saliency detection procedure must be as fast and compact as possible and optimally processes input images in a real time manner. It is an essential application requirement for the saliency detection task. However, contemporary detection methods often utilize some complicated procedures to pursue feeble improvements on the detection precession, which always take hundreds of milliseconds and make them not easy to be applied practically. In this paper, we tackle this problem by proposing a fast and compact saliency score regression network which employs fully convolutional network, a special deep convolutional neural network, to estimate the saliency of objects in images. It is an extremely simplified end-to-end deep neural network without any pre-processings and post-processings. When given an image, the network can directly predict a dense full-resolution saliency map (image-to-image prediction). It works like a compact pipeline which effectively simplifies the detection procedure. Our method is evaluated on six public datasets, and experimental results show that it can achieve comparable or better precision performance than the state-of-the-art methods while get a significant improvement in detection speed (35 FPS, processing in real time).

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