arXiv subjects

Spyridon Loukovitis

Publications and source records attributed to Spyridon Loukovitis.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Sparse Computations in Deep Learning Inference

The computational demands of modern Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are immense and constantly growing. While training costs usually capture public attention, inference demands are also contributing in significant computational, energy and environmental footprints. Sparsity stands out as a critical mechanism for drastically reducing these resource demands. However, its potential remains largely untapped and is not yet fully incorporated in production AI systems. To bridge this gap, this work provides the necessary knowledge and insights for performance engineers keen to get involved in deep learning inference optimization. In particular, in this work we: a) discuss the various forms of sparsity that can be utilized in DNN inference, b) explain how the original dense computations translate to sparse kernels, c) provide an extensive bibliographic review of the state-of-the-art in the implementation of these kernels for CPUs and GPUs, d) discuss the availability of sparse datasets in support of sparsity-related research and development, e) explore the current software tools and frameworks that provide robust sparsity support, and f) present evaluation results of different implementations of the key SpMM and SDDMM kernels on CPU and GPU platforms. Ultimately, this paper aims to serve as a resource for performance engineers seeking to develop and deploy highly efficient sparse deep learning models in productions.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2025

Three-Way Open-Set Detection for Robust Autonomous Navigation

Autonomous navigation in complex scenes requires reliable perception across scenarios that the model did not encounter during its training. Along its route, an autonomous framework encounters objects it was trained to recognize, obstacles it has never seen, and background structures that resemble objects. Each of the three must be handled differently. To tackle this, existing open-set and out-of-distribution detectors discard low-confidence detections with an objectness threshold and only then test the rest for novelty. By forcing a single threshold like this they introduce a trade-off where a low threshold adds background clutter to the detected objects, while a high one may discard needed novel objects. We instead formulate open-set detection as a three-way classification of each detection into known object, unknown object, or background, computed post hoc from the outputs of a pretrained detector. We develop methods for domain generalization and for domain adaptation, evaluated across different detector families and benchmarks up to a combined semantic and covariate domain shift. To test the framework in a navigation context, we conduct simulations parameterized by the measured detection performance. The results show that the three-way decision yields safer and more efficient missions than binary alternatives.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Model-Agnostic Open-Set Air-to-Air Visual Object Detection for Reliable UAV Perception

Open-set detection is crucial for robust UAV autonomy in air-to-air object detection under real-world conditions. Traditional closed-set detectors degrade significantly under domain shifts and flight data corruption, posing risks to safety-critical applications. We propose a novel, model-agnostic open-set detection framework designed specifically for embedding-based detectors. The method explicitly handles unknown object rejection while maintaining robustness against corrupted flight data. It estimates semantic uncertainty via entropy modeling in the embedding space and incorporates spectral normalization and temperature scaling to enhance open-set discrimination. We validate our approach on the challenging AOT aerial benchmark and through extensive real-world flight tests. Comprehensive ablation studies demonstrate consistent improvements over baseline methods, achieving up to a 10\% relative AUROC gain compared to standard YOLO-based detectors. Additionally, we show that background rejection further strengthens robustness without compromising detection accuracy, making our solution particularly well-suited for reliable UAV perception in dynamic air-to-air environments.

cs.CV↗