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Pengfei Xu

Publications and source records attributed to Pengfei Xu.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

MoGraphGPT: Creating Interactive Scenes Using Modular LLM and Graphical Control

Creating interactive scenes often involves complex programming tasks. Although large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can generate code from natural language, their output is often error-prone, particularly when scripting interactions among multiple elements. The linear conversational structure limits the editing of individual elements, and lacking graphical and precise control complicates visual integration. To address these issues, we integrate an element-level modularization technique that processes textual descriptions for individual elements through separate LLM modules, with a central module managing interactions among elements. This modular approach allows for refining each element independently. We design a graphical user interface, MoGraphGPT , which combines modular LLMs with enhanced graphical control to generate codes for 2D interactive scenes. It enables direct integration of graphical information and offers quick, precise control through automatically generated sliders. Our comparative evaluation against an AI coding tool, Cursor Composer, as the baseline system and a usability study show MoGraphGPT significantly improves easiness, controllability, and refinement in creating complex 2D interactive scenes with multiple visual elements in a coding-free manner.

cs.HC↗

Multi-source Domain Adaptation for Panoramic Semantic Segmentation

Unsupervised domain adaptation methods for panoramic semantic segmentation utilize real pinhole images or low-cost synthetic panoramic images to transfer segmentation models to real panoramic images. However, these methods struggle to understand the panoramic structure using only real pinhole images and lack real-world scene perception with only synthetic panoramic images. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new task, Multi-source Domain Adaptation for Panoramic Semantic Segmentation (MSDA4PASS), which leverages both real pinhole and synthetic panoramic images to improve segmentation on unlabeled real panoramic images. There are two key issues in the MSDA4PASS task: (1) distortion gaps between the pinhole and panoramic domains -- panoramic images exhibit global and local distortions absent in pinhole images; (2) texture gaps between the source and target domains -- scenes and styles differ across domains. To address these two issues, we propose a novel framework, Deformation Transform Aligner for Panoramic Semantic Segmentation (DTA4PASS), which converts all pinhole images in the source domains into distorted images and aligns the source distorted and panoramic images with the target panoramic images. Specifically, DTA4PASS consists of two main components: Unpaired Semantic Morphing (USM) and Distortion Gating Alignment (DGA). First, in USM, the Dual-view Discriminator (DvD) assists in training the diffeomorphic deformation network at the image and pixel level, enabling the effective deformation transformation of pinhole images without paired panoramic views, alleviating distortion gaps. Second, DGA assigns pinhole-like (pin-like) and panoramic-like (pan-like) features to each image by gating, and aligns these two features through uncertainty estimation, reducing texture gaps.

cs.CV↗

Bridge then Begin Anew: Generating Target-relevant Intermediate Model for Source-free Visual Emotion Adaptation

Visual emotion recognition (VER), which aims at understanding humans' emotional reactions toward different visual stimuli, has attracted increasing attention. Given the subjective and ambiguous characteristics of emotion, annotating a reliable large-scale dataset is hard. For reducing reliance on data labeling, domain adaptation offers an alternative solution by adapting models trained on labeled source data to unlabeled target data. Conventional domain adaptation methods require access to source data. However, due to privacy concerns, source emotional data may be inaccessible. To address this issue, we propose an unexplored task: source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) for VER, which does not have access to source data during the adaptation process. To achieve this, we propose a novel framework termed Bridge then Begin Anew (BBA), which consists of two steps: domain-bridged model generation (DMG) and target-related model adaptation (TMA). First, the DMG bridges cross-domain gaps by generating an intermediate model, avoiding direct alignment between two VER datasets with significant differences. Then, the TMA begins training the target model anew to fit the target structure, avoiding the influence of source-specific knowledge. Extensive experiments are conducted on six SFDA settings for VER. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of BBA, which achieves remarkable performance gains compared with state-of-the-art SFDA methods and outperforms representative unsupervised domain adaptation approaches.

cs.CV↗

Self-supervised Preference Optimization: Enhance Your Language Model with Preference Degree Awareness

Recently, there has been significant interest in replacing the reward model in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) methods for Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants. These approaches commonly use a binary cross-entropy mechanism on pairwise samples, i.e., minimizing and maximizing the loss based on preferred or dis-preferred responses, respectively. However, while this training strategy omits the reward model, it also overlooks the varying preference degrees within different responses. We hypothesize that this is a key factor hindering LLMs from sufficiently understanding human preferences. To address this problem, we propose a novel Self-supervised Preference Optimization (SPO) framework, which constructs a self-supervised preference degree loss combined with the alignment loss, thereby helping LLMs improve their ability to understand the degree of preference. Extensive experiments are conducted on two widely used datasets of different tasks. The results demonstrate that SPO can be seamlessly integrated with existing preference optimization methods and significantly boost their performance to achieve state-of-the-art performance. We also conduct detailed analyses to offer comprehensive insights into SPO, which verifies its effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/lijian16/SPO.

cs.CL↗

Large-scale road network partitioning: a deep learning method based on convolutional autoencoder model

With the development of urbanization, the scale of urban road network continues to expand, especially in some Asian countries. Short-term traffic state prediction is one of the bases of traffic management and control. Constrained by the space-time cost of computation, the short-term traffic state prediction of large-scale urban road network is difficult. One way to solve this problem is to partition the whole network into multiple sub-networks to predict traffic state separately. In this study, a deep learning method is proposed for road network partitioning. The method mainly includes three steps. First, the daily speed series for roads are encoded into the matrix. Second, a convolutional autoencoder (AE) is built to extract series features and compress data. Third, the spatial hierarchical clustering method with adjacency relationship is applied in the road network. The proposed method was verified by the road network of Shenzhen which contains more than 5000 links. The results show that AE-hierarchical clustering distinguishes the tidal traffic characteristics and reflects the process of congestion propagation. Furthermore, two indicators are designed to make a quantitative comparison with spectral clustering: intra homogeneity increases by about 9% on average while inter heterogeneity about 9.5%. Compared with past methods, the time cost also decreases. The results may suggest ways to improve the management and control of urban road network in other metropolitan cities. The proposed method is expected to be extended to other problems related to large-scale networks.

eess.SY↗

FRI-Net: Floorplan Reconstruction via Room-wise Implicit Representation

In this paper, we introduce a novel method called FRI-Net for 2D floorplan reconstruction from 3D point cloud. Existing methods typically rely on corner regression or box regression, which lack consideration for the global shapes of rooms. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach using a room-wise implicit representation with structural regularization to characterize the shapes of rooms in floorplans. By incorporating geometric priors of room layouts in floorplans into our training strategy, the generated room polygons are more geometrically regular. We have conducted experiments on two challenging datasets, Structured3D and SceneCAD. Our method demonstrates improved performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, validating the effectiveness of our proposed representation for floorplan reconstruction.

cs.CV↗

MapVision: CVPR 2024 Autonomous Grand Challenge Mapless Driving Tech Report

Autonomous driving without high-definition (HD) maps demands a higher level of active scene understanding. In this competition, the organizers provided the multi-perspective camera images and standard-definition (SD) maps to explore the boundaries of scene reasoning capabilities. We found that most existing algorithms construct Bird's Eye View (BEV) features from these multi-perspective images and use multi-task heads to delineate road centerlines, boundary lines, pedestrian crossings, and other areas. However, these algorithms perform poorly at the far end of roads and struggle when the primary subject in the image is occluded. Therefore, in this competition, we not only used multi-perspective images as input but also incorporated SD maps to address this issue. We employed map encoder pre-training to enhance the network's geometric encoding capabilities and utilized YOLOX to improve traffic element detection precision. Additionally, for area detection, we innovatively introduced LDTR and auxiliary tasks to achieve higher precision. As a result, our final OLUS score is 0.58.

cs.CV↗

Region-Aware Color Smudging

Color smudge operations from digital painting software enable users to create natural shading effects in high-fidelity paintings by interactively mixing colors. To precisely control results in traditional painting software, users tend to organize flat-filled color regions in multiple layers and smudge them to generate different color gradients. However, the requirement to carefully deal with regions makes the smudging process time-consuming and laborious, especially for non-professional users. This motivates us to investigate how to infer user-desired smudging effects when users smudge over regions in a single layer. To investigate improving color smudge performance, we first conduct a formative study. Following the findings of this study, we design SmartSmudge, a novel smudge tool that offers users dynamical smudge brushes and real-time region selection for easily generating natural and efficient shading effects. We demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed tool via a user study and quantitative analysis

cs.GR↗

More is Better: Deep Domain Adaptation with Multiple Sources

In many practical applications, it is often difficult and expensive to obtain large-scale labeled data to train state-of-the-art deep neural networks. Therefore, transferring the learned knowledge from a separate, labeled source domain to an unlabeled or sparsely labeled target domain becomes an appealing alternative. However, direct transfer often results in significant performance decay due to domain shift. Domain adaptation (DA) aims to address this problem by aligning the distributions between the source and target domains. Multi-source domain adaptation (MDA) is a powerful and practical extension in which the labeled data may be collected from multiple sources with different distributions. In this survey, we first define various MDA strategies. Then we systematically summarize and compare modern MDA methods in the deep learning era from different perspectives, followed by commonly used datasets and a brief benchmark. Finally, we discuss future research directions for MDA that are worth investigating.

cs.CV↗

LDTR: Transformer-based Lane Detection with Anchor-chain Representation

Despite recent advances in lane detection methods, scenarios with limited- or no-visual-clue of lanes due to factors such as lighting conditions and occlusion remain challenging and crucial for automated driving. Moreover, current lane representations require complex post-processing and struggle with specific instances. Inspired by the DETR architecture, we propose LDTR, a transformer-based model to address these issues. Lanes are modeled with a novel anchor-chain, regarding a lane as a whole from the beginning, which enables LDTR to handle special lanes inherently. To enhance lane instance perception, LDTR incorporates a novel multi-referenced deformable attention module to distribute attention around the object. Additionally, LDTR incorporates two line IoU algorithms to improve convergence efficiency and employs a Gaussian heatmap auxiliary branch to enhance model representation capability during training. To evaluate lane detection models, we rely on Frechet distance, parameterized F1-score, and additional synthetic metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that LDTR achieves state-of-the-art performance on well-known datasets.

cs.CV↗

CANet: Curved Guide Line Network with Adaptive Decoder for Lane Detection

Lane detection is challenging due to the complicated on road scenarios and line deformation from different camera perspectives. Lots of solutions were proposed, but can not deal with corner lanes well. To address this problem, this paper proposes a new top-down deep learning lane detection approach, CANET. A lane instance is first responded by the heat-map on the U-shaped curved guide line at global semantic level, thus the corresponding features of each lane are aggregated at the response point. Then CANET obtains the heat-map response of the entire lane through conditional convolution, and finally decodes the point set to describe lanes via adaptive decoder. The experimental results show that CANET reaches SOTA in different metrics. Our code will be released soon.

cs.CV↗

Proactive Rumor Control: When Impression Counts (Full Version)

The spread of rumors in online networks threatens public safety and results in economic losses. To overcome this problem, a lot of work studies the problem of rumor control which aims at limiting the spread of rumors. However, all previous work ignores the relationship between the influence block effect and counts of impressions on the user. In this paper, we study the problem of minimizing the spread of rumors when impression counts. Given a graph $G(V,E)$, a rumor set $R \in V$ and a budget $k$, it aims to find a protector set $P \in V \backslash R$ to minimize the spread of the rumor set $R$ under the budget $k$. Due to the impression counts, two following challenges of our problem need to be overcome: (1) our problem is NP-hard; (2) the influence block is non-submodular, which means a straightforward greedy approach is not applicable. Hence, we devise a branch-and-bound framework for this problem with a ($1-1/e-ε$) approximation ratio. To further improve the efficiency, we speed up our framework with a progressive upper bound estimation method, which achieves a ($1-1/e-ε- ρ$) approximation ratio. We conduct experiments on real-world datasets to verify the efficiency, effectiveness, and scalability of our methods.

cs.SI↗

Panacea or Placebo? Exploring Causal Effects of Nonlocal Vehicle Driving Restriction Policies on Traffic Congestion Using Difference-in-differences Approach

Car dependence has been threatening transportation sustainability as it contributes to congestion and associated externalities. In response, various transport policies that restrict the use of private vehicle have been implemented. However, empirical evaluations of such policies have been limited. To assess these policies' benefits and costs, it is imperative to accurately evaluate how such policies affect traffic conditions. In this study, we compile a refined spatio-temporal resolution data set of the floating-vehicle-based traffic performance index to examine the effects of a recent nonlocal vehicle driving restriction policy in Shanghai, one of most populous cities in the world. Specifically, we explore whether and how the policy impacted traffic speeds in the short term by employing a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences modeling approach. We find that: (1) In the first month, the policy led to an increase of the network-level traffic speed by 1.47% (0.352 km/h) during evening peak hours (17:00-19:00) but had no significant effects during morning peak hours (7:00-9:00). (2) The policy also helped improve the network-level traffic speed in some unrestricted hours (6:00, 12:00, 14:00, and 20:00) although the impact was marginal. (3) The short-term effects of the policy exhibited heterogeneity across traffic analysis zones. The lower the metro station density, the greater the effects were. We conclude that driving restrictions for non-local vehicles alone may not significantly reduce congestion, and their effects can differ both temporally and spatially. However, they can have potential side effects such as increased purchase and usage of new energy vehicles, owners of which can obtain a local license plate of Shanghai for free.

econ.GN↗

The Space of Closed $G_2$-Structures. I. Connections

In this article, we develop foundational theory for geometries of the space of closed $G_2$-structures in a given cohomology class as an infinite-dimensional manifold. We introduce Sobolev-type metrics, construct their Levi-Civita connections, formulate geodesic equations, and analyse the variational structures of torsion free $G_2$-structures under these Sobolev-type metrics.

math.DG↗

S4OD: Semi-Supervised learning for Single-Stage Object Detection

Single-stage detectors suffer from extreme foreground-background class imbalance, while two-stage detectors do not. Therefore, in semi-supervised object detection, two-stage detectors can deliver remarkable performance by only selecting high-quality pseudo labels based on classification scores. However, directly applying this strategy to single-stage detectors would aggravate the class imbalance with fewer positive samples. Thus, single-stage detectors have to consider both quality and quantity of pseudo labels simultaneously. In this paper, we design a dynamic self-adaptive threshold (DSAT) strategy in classification branch, which can automatically select pseudo labels to achieve an optimal trade-off between quality and quantity. Besides, to assess the regression quality of pseudo labels in single-stage detectors, we propose a module to compute the regression uncertainty of boxes based on Non-Maximum Suppression. By leveraging only 10% labeled data from COCO, our method achieves 35.0% AP on anchor-free detector (FCOS) and 32.9% on anchor-based detector (RetinaNet).

cs.CV↗

A Critical Analysis of Image-based Camera Pose Estimation Techniques

Camera, and associated with its objects within the field of view, localization could benefit many computer vision fields, such as autonomous driving, robot navigation, and augmented reality (AR). In this survey, we first introduce specific application areas and the evaluation metrics for camera localization pose according to different sub-tasks (learning-based 2D-2D task, feature-based 2D-3D task, and 3D-3D task). Then, we review common methods for structure-based camera pose estimation approaches, absolute pose regression and relative pose regression approaches by critically modelling the methods to inspire further improvements in their algorithms such as loss functions, neural network structures. Furthermore, we summarise what are the popular datasets used for camera localization and compare the quantitative and qualitative results of these methods with detailed performance metrics. Finally, we discuss future research possibilities and applications.

cs.CV↗

A Comprehensive Survey of Scene Graphs: Generation and Application

Scene graph is a structured representation of a scene that can clearly express the objects, attributes, and relationships between objects in the scene. As computer vision technology continues to develop, people are no longer satisfied with simply detecting and recognizing objects in images; instead, people look forward to a higher level of understanding and reasoning about visual scenes. For example, given an image, we want to not only detect and recognize objects in the image, but also know the relationship between objects (visual relationship detection), and generate a text description (image captioning) based on the image content. Alternatively, we might want the machine to tell us what the little girl in the image is doing (Visual Question Answering (VQA)), or even remove the dog from the image and find similar images (image editing and retrieval), etc. These tasks require a higher level of understanding and reasoning for image vision tasks. The scene graph is just such a powerful tool for scene understanding. Therefore, scene graphs have attracted the attention of a large number of researchers, and related research is often cross-modal, complex, and rapidly developing. However, no relatively systematic survey of scene graphs exists at present. To this end, this survey conducts a comprehensive investigation of the current scene graph research. More specifically, we first summarized the general definition of the scene graph, then conducted a comprehensive and systematic discussion on the generation method of the scene graph (SGG) and the SGG with the aid of prior knowledge. We then investigated the main applications of scene graphs and summarized the most commonly used datasets. Finally, we provide some insights into the future development of scene graphs. We believe this will be a very helpful foundation for future research on scene graphs.

cs.CV↗

SmartDeal: Re-Modeling Deep Network Weights for Efficient Inference and Training

The record-breaking performance of deep neural networks (DNNs) comes with heavy parameterization, leading to external dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) for storage. The prohibitive energy of DRAM accesses makes it non-trivial to deploy DNN on resource-constrained devices, calling for minimizing the weight and data movements to improve the energy efficiency. We present SmartDeal (SD), an algorithm framework to trade higher-cost memory storage/access for lower-cost computation, in order to aggressively boost the storage and energy efficiency, for both inference and training. The core of SD is a novel weight decomposition with structural constraints, carefully crafted to unleash the hardware efficiency potential. Specifically, we decompose each weight tensor as the product of a small basis matrix and a large structurally sparse coefficient matrix whose non-zeros are quantized to power-of-2. The resulting sparse and quantized DNNs enjoy greatly reduced energy for data movement and weight storage, incurring minimal overhead to recover the original weights thanks to the sparse bit-operations and cost-favorable computations. Beyond inference, we take another leap to embrace energy-efficient training, introducing innovative techniques to address the unique roadblocks arising in training while preserving the SD structures. We also design a dedicated hardware accelerator to fully utilize the SD structure to improve the real energy efficiency and latency. We conduct experiments on both multiple tasks, models and datasets in different settings. Results show that: 1) applied to inference, SD achieves up to 2.44x energy efficiency as evaluated via real hardware implementations; 2) applied to training, SD leads to 10.56x and 4.48x reduction in the storage and training energy, with negligible accuracy loss compared to state-of-the-art training baselines. Our source codes are available online.

cs.LG↗