arXiv subjects

Weiming Li

Publications and source records attributed to Weiming Li.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Debiased distributed PCA under high dimensional spiked model

We study distributed principal component analysis (PCA) in high-dimensional settings under the spiked model. In such regimes, sample eigenvectors can deviate significantly from population ones, introducing a persistent bias. Existing distributed PCA methods are sensitive to this bias, particularly when the number of machines is small. Their consistency typically relies on the number of machines tending to infinity. We propose a debiased distributed PCA algorithm that corrects the local bias before aggregation and incorporates a sparsity-detection step to adaptively handle sparse and non-sparse eigenvectors. Theoretically, we establish the consistency of our estimator under much weaker conditions compared to existing literature. In particular, our approach does not require symmetric innovations and only assumes a finite sixth moment. Furthermore, our method generally achieves smaller estimation error, especially when the number of machines is small. Empirically, extensive simulations and real data experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing distributed PCA approaches. The advantage is especially prominent when the leading eigenvectors are sparse or the number of machines is limited. Our method and theoretical analysis are also applicable to the sample correlation matrix.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2025

MapFusion: A Novel BEV Feature Fusion Network for Multi-modal Map Construction

Map construction task plays a vital role in providing precise and comprehensive static environmental information essential for autonomous driving systems. Primary sensors include cameras and LiDAR, with configurations varying between camera-only, LiDAR-only, or camera-LiDAR fusion, based on cost-performance considerations. While fusion-based methods typically perform best, existing approaches often neglect modality interaction and rely on simple fusion strategies, which suffer from the problems of misalignment and information loss. To address these issues, we propose MapFusion, a novel multi-modal Bird's-Eye View (BEV) feature fusion method for map construction. Specifically, to solve the semantic misalignment problem between camera and LiDAR BEV features, we introduce the Cross-modal Interaction Transform (CIT) module, enabling interaction between two BEV feature spaces and enhancing feature representation through a self-attention mechanism. Additionally, we propose an effective Dual Dynamic Fusion (DDF) module to adaptively select valuable information from different modalities, which can take full advantage of the inherent information between different modalities. Moreover, MapFusion is designed to be simple and plug-and-play, easily integrated into existing pipelines. We evaluate MapFusion on two map construction tasks, including High-definition (HD) map and BEV map segmentation, to show its versatility and effectiveness. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, MapFusion achieves 3.6% and 6.2% absolute improvements on the HD map construction and BEV map segmentation tasks on the nuScenes dataset, respectively, demonstrating the superiority of our approach.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

An asymptotic-preserving IMEX PN method for the gray model of the radiative transfer equation

An asymptotic-preserving (AP) implicit-explicit PN numerical scheme is proposed for the gray model of the radiative transfer equation, where the first- and second-order numerical schemes are discussed for both the linear and nonlinear models. The AP property of this numerical scheme is proved theoretically and numerically, while the numerical stability of the linear model is verified by Fourier analysis. Several classical benchmark examples are studied to validate the efficiency of this numerical scheme.

math.NA↗

arXiv2024

Rethinking Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning: Policy Imitation, Transferable Reward Recovery and Algebraic Equilibrium Proof

Adversarial inverse reinforcement learning (AIRL) stands as a cornerstone approach in imitation learning, yet it faces criticisms from prior studies. In this paper, we rethink AIRL and respond to these criticisms. Criticism 1 lies in Inadequate Policy Imitation. We show that substituting the built-in algorithm with soft actor-critic (SAC) during policy updating (requires multi-iterations) significantly enhances the efficiency of policy imitation. Criticism 2 lies in Limited Performance in Transferable Reward Recovery Despite SAC Integration. While we find that SAC indeed exhibits a significant improvement in policy imitation, it introduces drawbacks to transferable reward recovery. We prove that the SAC algorithm itself is not feasible to disentangle the reward function comprehensively during the AIRL training process, and propose a hybrid framework, PPO-AIRL + SAC, for a satisfactory transfer effect. Criticism 3 lies in Unsatisfactory Proof from the Perspective of Potential Equilibrium. We reanalyze it from an algebraic theory perspective.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Is Your HD Map Constructor Reliable under Sensor Corruptions?

Driving systems often rely on high-definition (HD) maps for precise environmental information, which is crucial for planning and navigation. While current HD map constructors perform well under ideal conditions, their resilience to real-world challenges, \eg, adverse weather and sensor failures, is not well understood, raising safety concerns. This work introduces MapBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness of HD map construction methods against various sensor corruptions. Our benchmark encompasses a total of 29 types of corruptions that occur from cameras and LiDAR sensors. Extensive evaluations across 31 HD map constructors reveal significant performance degradation of existing methods under adverse weather conditions and sensor failures, underscoring critical safety concerns. We identify effective strategies for enhancing robustness, including innovative approaches that leverage multi-modal fusion, advanced data augmentation, and architectural techniques. These insights provide a pathway for developing more reliable HD map construction methods, which are essential for the advancement of autonomous driving technology. The benchmark toolkit and affiliated code and model checkpoints have been made publicly accessible.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

NN-Copula-CD: A Copula-Guided Interpretable Neural Network for Change Detection in Heterogeneous Remote Sensing Images

Change detection (CD) in heterogeneous remote sensing images has been widely used for disaster monitoring and land-use management. In the past decade, the heterogeneous CD problem has significantly benefited from the development of deep neural networks (DNNs). However, the purely data-driven DNNs perform like a black box where the lack of interpretability limits the trustworthiness and controllability of DNNs in most practical CD applications. As a powerful knowledge-driven tool, copula theory performs well in modeling relationships among random variables. To enhance the interpretability of existing neural networks for CD, we propose a knowledge-data-driven heterogeneous CD method based on a copula-guided neural network, named NN-Copula-CD. In our NN-Copula-CD, the mathematical characteristics of copula are employed as the loss functions to supervise a neural network to learn the dependence between bi-temporal heterogeneous superpixel pairs, and then the changed regions are identified via binary classification based on the degrees of dependence of all the superpixel pairs in the bi-temporal images. We conduct in-depth experiments on three datasets with heterogeneous images, where both quantitative and visual results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed NN-Copula-CD method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Terahertz Channels in Atmospheric Conditions: Propagation Characteristics and Security Performance

With the growing demand for higher wireless data rates, the interest in extending the carrier frequency of wireless links to the terahertz (THz) range has significantly increased. For long-distance outdoor wireless communications, THz channels may suffer substantial power loss and security issues due to atmospheric weather effects. It is crucial to assess the impact of weather on high-capacity data transmission to evaluate wireless system link budgets and performance accurately. In this article, we provide an insight into the propagation characteristics of THz channels under atmospheric conditions and the security aspects of THz communication systems in future applications. We conduct a comprehensive survey of our recent research and experimental findings on THz channel transmission and physical layer security, synthesizing and categorizing the state-of-the-art research in this domain. Our analysis encompasses various atmospheric phenomena, including molecular absorption, scattering effects, and turbulence, elucidating their intricate interactions with THz waves and the resultant implications for channel modeling and system design. Furthermore, we investigate the unique security challenges posed by THz communications, examining potential vulnerabilities and proposing novel countermeasures to enhance the resilience of these high-frequency systems against eavesdropping and other security threats. Finally, we discuss the challenges and limitations of such high-frequency wireless communications and provide insights into future research prospects for realizing the 6G vision, emphasizing the need for innovative solutions to overcome the atmospheric hurdles and security concerns in THz communications.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

On spiked eigenvalues of a renormalized sample covariance matrix from multi-population

Sample covariance matrices from multi-population typically exhibit several large spiked eigenvalues, which stem from differences between population means and are crucial for inference on the underlying data structure. This paper investigates the asymptotic properties of spiked eigenvalues of a renormalized sample covariance matrices from multi-population in the ultrahigh dimensional context where the dimension-to-sample size ratio p/n go to infinity. The first- and second-order convergence of these spikes are established based on asymptotic properties of three types of sesquilinear forms from multi-population. These findings are further applied to two scenarios,including determination of total number of subgroups and a new criterion for evaluating clustering results in the absence of true labels. Additionally, we provide a unified framework with p/n->c\in (0,\infty] that integrates the asymptotic results in both high and ultrahigh dimensional settings.

math.ST↗

arXiv2024

Large Language Models Understand Layout

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate extraordinary abilities in a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper, we show that, beyond text understanding capability, LLMs are capable of processing text layouts that are denoted by spatial markers. They are able to answer questions that require explicit spatial perceiving and reasoning, while a drastic performance drop is observed when the spatial markers from the original data are excluded. We perform a series of experiments with the GPT-3.5, Baichuan2, Llama2 and ChatGLM3 models on various types of layout-sensitive datasets for further analysis. The experimental results reveal that the layout understanding ability of LLMs is mainly introduced by the coding data for pretraining, which is further enhanced at the instruction-tuning stage. In addition, layout understanding can be enhanced by integrating low-cost, auto-generated data approached by a novel text game. Finally, we show that layout understanding ability is beneficial for building efficient visual question-answering (VQA) systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

DVI-SLAM: A Dual Visual Inertial SLAM Network

Recent deep learning based visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) methods have made significant progress. However, how to make full use of visual information as well as better integrate with inertial measurement unit (IMU) in visual SLAM has potential research value. This paper proposes a novel deep SLAM network with dual visual factors. The basic idea is to integrate both photometric factor and re-projection factor into the end-to-end differentiable structure through multi-factor data association module. We show that the proposed network dynamically learns and adjusts the confidence maps of both visual factors and it can be further extended to include the IMU factors as well. Extensive experiments validate that our proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on several public datasets, including TartanAir, EuRoC and ETH3D-SLAM. Specifically, when dynamically fusing the three factors together, the absolute trajectory error for both monocular and stereo configurations on EuRoC dataset has reduced by 45.3% and 36.2% respectively.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Lightweight Change Detection in Heterogeneous Remote Sensing Images with Online All-Integer Pruning Training

Detection of changes in heterogeneous remote sensing images is vital, especially in response to emergencies like earthquakes and floods. Current homogenous transformation-based change detection (CD) methods often suffer from high computation and memory costs, which are not friendly to edge-computation devices like onboard CD devices at satellites. To address this issue, this paper proposes a new lightweight CD method for heterogeneous remote sensing images that employs the online all-integer pruning (OAIP) training strategy to efficiently fine-tune the CD network using the current test data. The proposed CD network consists of two visual geometry group (VGG) subnetworks as the backbone architecture. In the OAIP-based training process, all the weights, gradients, and intermediate data are quantized to integers to speed up training and reduce memory usage, where the per-layer block exponentiation scaling scheme is utilized to reduce the computation errors of network parameters caused by quantization. Second, an adaptive filter-level pruning method based on the L1-norm criterion is employed to further lighten the fine-tuning process of the CD network. Experimental results show that the proposed OAIP-based method attains similar detection performance (but with significantly reduced computation complexity and memory usage) in comparison with state-of-the-art CD methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

DOCTR: Disentangled Object-Centric Transformer for Point Scene Understanding

Point scene understanding is a challenging task to process real-world scene point cloud, which aims at segmenting each object, estimating its pose, and reconstructing its mesh simultaneously. Recent state-of-the-art method first segments each object and then processes them independently with multiple stages for the different sub-tasks. This leads to a complex pipeline to optimize and makes it hard to leverage the relationship constraints between multiple objects. In this work, we propose a novel Disentangled Object-Centric TRansformer (DOCTR) that explores object-centric representation to facilitate learning with multiple objects for the multiple sub-tasks in a unified manner. Each object is represented as a query, and a Transformer decoder is adapted to iteratively optimize all the queries involving their relationship. In particular, we introduce a semantic-geometry disentangled query (SGDQ) design that enables the query features to attend separately to semantic information and geometric information relevant to the corresponding sub-tasks. A hybrid bipartite matching module is employed to well use the supervisions from all the sub-tasks during training. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the challenging ScanNet dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/SAITPublic/DOCTR.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

DOR3D-Net: Dense Ordinal Regression Network for 3D Hand Pose Estimation

Depth-based 3D hand pose estimation is an important but challenging research task in human-machine interaction community. Recently, dense regression methods have attracted increasing attention in 3D hand pose estimation task, which provide a low computational burden and high accuracy regression way by densely regressing hand joint offset maps. However, large-scale regression offset values are often affected by noise and outliers, leading to a significant drop in accuracy. To tackle this, we re-formulate 3D hand pose estimation as a dense ordinal regression problem and propose a novel Dense Ordinal Regression 3D Pose Network (DOR3D-Net). Specifically, we first decompose offset value regression into sub-tasks of binary classifications with ordinal constraints. Then, each binary classifier can predict the probability of a binary spatial relationship relative to joint, which is easier to train and yield much lower level of noise. The estimated hand joint positions are inferred by aggregating the ordinal regression results at local positions with a weighted sum. Furthermore, both joint regression loss and ordinal regression loss are used to train our DOR3D-Net in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on public datasets (ICVL, MSRA, NYU and HANDS2017) show that our design provides significant improvements over SOTA methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

An asymptotic-preserving method for the three-temperature radiative transfer model

We present an asymptotic-preserving (AP) numerical method for solving the three-temperature radiative transfer model, which holds significant importance in inertial confinement fusion. A carefully designedsplitting method is developed that can provide a general framework of extending AP schemes for the gray radiative transport equation to the more complex three-temperature radiative transfer model. The proposed scheme captures two important limiting models: the three-temperature radiation diffusion equation (3TRDE) when opacity approaches infinity and the two-temperature limit when the ion-electron coupling coefficient goes to infinity. We have rigorously demonstrated the AP property and energy conservation characteristics of the proposed scheme and its efficiency has been validated through a series of benchmark tests in the numerical part.

math.NA↗

arXiv2023

An implicit unified gas-kinetic wave-particle method for radiative transport process

The unified gas-kinetic wave-particle method (UGKWP) has been developed for the multiscale gas, plasma, and multiphase flow transport processes for the past years. In this work, we propose an implicit unified gas-kinetic wave-particle (IUGKWP) method to remove the CFL time step constraint. Based on the local integral solution of the radiative transfer equation (RTE), the particle transport processes are categorized into the long-$λ$ streaming process and the short-$λ$ streaming process comparing to a local physical characteristic time $t_p$. In the construction of the IUGKWP method, the long-$λ$ streaming process is tracked by the implicit Monte Carlo (IMC) method; the short-$λ$ streaming process is evolved by solving the implicit moments equations; and the photon distribution is closed by a local integral solution of RTE. In the IUGKWP method, the multiscale flux of radiation energy and the multiscale closure of photon distribution are constructed based on the local integral solution. The IUGKWP method preserves the second-order asymptotic expansion of RTE in the optically thick regime and adapts its computational complexity to the flow regime. The numerical dissipation is well controlled, and the teleportation error is significantly reduced in the optically thick regime. The computational complexity of the IUGKWP method decreases exponentially as the Knudsen number approaches zero, and the computational efficiency is remarkably improved in the optically thick regime. The IUGKWP is formulated on a generalized unstructured mesh, and multidimensional 2D and 3D algorithms are developed. Numerical tests are presented to validate the capability of IUGKWP in capturing the multiscale photon transport process. The algorithm and code will apply in the engineering applications of inertial confinement fusion (ICF).

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2023

MCTNet: A Multi-Scale CNN-Transformer Network for Change Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images

For the task of change detection (CD) in remote sensing images, deep convolution neural networks (CNNs)-based methods have recently aggregated transformer modules to improve the capability of global feature extraction. However, they suffer degraded CD performance on small changed areas due to the simple single-scale integration of deep CNNs and transformer modules. To address this issue, we propose a hybrid network based on multi-scale CNN-transformer structure, termed MCTNet, where the multi-scale global and local information are exploited to enhance the robustness of the CD performance on changed areas with different sizes. Especially, we design the ConvTrans block to adaptively aggregate global features from transformer modules and local features from CNN layers, which provides abundant global-local features with different scales. Experimental results demonstrate that our MCTNet achieves better detection performance than existing state-of-the-art CD methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Unified Gas-Kinetic Particle Method for Frequency-dependent Radiation Transport

This paper proposes a unified gas-kinetic particle (UGKP) method for the frequency-dependent photon transport process. The photon transport is a typical multiscale process governed by the nonlinear radiative transfer equations (RTE). The flow regime of photon transport varies from the ballistic regime to the diffusive regime with respect to optical depth and photon frequency. The UGKP method is an asymptotic preserving (AP) scheme and a regime adaptive scheme. The teleportation error is significantly reduced, and the computational efficiency is remarkably improved in the diffusive regime. Distinguished from the standard multigroup treatment, the proposed UGKP method solves the frequency space in a non-discretized way. Therefore the Rosseland diffusion system can be precisely preserved in the optically thick regime. Taking advantage of the local integral solution of RTE, the distribution of the emitted photon can be constructed from its macroscopic moments. The Monte Carlo particles in the UGKP method need only be tracked before their first collision events, and a re-sampling process is performed to close the photon distribution for each time step. The large computational cost of excessive scattering events can be saved, especially in the optically thick regime. The proposed UGKP method is implicit and removes the light speed constraint on the time step. The particle tracking approach combining the implicit formulation makes the proposed UGKP method an efficient solution algorithm for frequency-dependent radiative transfer problems. We demonstrate with numerical examples the capability of the proposed multi-frequency UGKP method.

math.NA↗

arXiv2022

An asymptotic-preserving IMEX method for nonlinear radiative transfer equation

We present an asymptotic preserving method for the radiative transfer equations in the framework of PN method. An implicit and explicit method is proposed to solve the P N system based on the order analysis of the expansion coefficients of the distribution function. The order of each coefficient expanded in the Knudsen number is found through the process of Maxwellian iteration, and the coefficients of high order are treated explicitly while that of low order are treated implicitly in each equation of P N system. Energy inequality is proved for this numerical scheme. Several numerical examples validate this new AP scheme in both optical thick and thin regions.

math.NA↗