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Xu Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Xu Liu.

At least 181 records · Page 10Linked to original sources
arXiv2023

Rigorous and efficient diffraction modeling between arbitrary planes by angular spectrum rearrangement

In computational optics, numerical modeling of diffraction between arbitrary planes offers unparalleled flexibility. However, existing methods suffer from the trade-off between computational accuracy and efficiency. To resolve this dilemma, we present a novel approach that rigorously and efficiently models wave propagation between two arbitrary planes. This is achieved by rearranging the angular spectrum of the source field, coupled with linear algebraic computations. Notably, our method achieves comparable computational efficiency to the control method for both scalar and vectorial diffraction modeling, while eliminating nearly all numerical errors. Furthermore, we selectively merge the angular spectrum to further enhance the efficiency at the expense of precision in a controlled manner. Thereafter, the time consumption is reduced to at most 3% of that before merging.

physics.optics↗
arXiv2023

Free Lunch for Gait Recognition: A Novel Relation Descriptor

Gait recognition is to seek correct matches for query individuals by their unique walking patterns. However, current methods focus solely on extracting individual-specific features, overlooking ``interpersonal" relationships. In this paper, we propose a novel $\textbf{Relation Descriptor}$ that captures not only individual features but also relations between test gaits and pre-selected gait anchors. Specifically, we reinterpret classifier weights as gait anchors and compute similarity scores between test features and these anchors, which re-expresses individual gait features into a similarity relation distribution. In essence, the relation descriptor offers a holistic perspective that leverages the collective knowledge stored within the classifier's weights, emphasizing meaningful patterns and enhancing robustness. Despite its potential, relation descriptor poses dimensionality challenges since its dimension depends on the training set's identity count. To address this, we propose Farthest gait-Anchor Selection to identify the most discriminative gait anchors and an Orthogonal Regularization Loss to increase diversity within gait anchors. Compared to individual-specific features extracted from the backbone, our relation descriptor can boost the performance nearly without any extra costs. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on the popular GREW, Gait3D, OU-MVLP, CASIA-B, and CCPG, showing that our method consistently outperforms the baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

CLIPC8: Face liveness detection algorithm based on image-text pairs and contrastive learning

Face recognition technology is widely used in the financial field, and various types of liveness attack behaviors need to be addressed. Existing liveness detection algorithms are trained on specific training datasets and tested on testing datasets, but their performance and robustness in transferring to unseen datasets are relatively poor. To tackle this issue, we propose a face liveness detection method based on image-text pairs and contrastive learning, dividing liveness attack problems in the financial field into eight categories and using text information to describe the images of these eight types of attacks. The text encoder and image encoder are used to extract feature vector representations for the classification description text and face images, respectively. By maximizing the similarity of positive samples and minimizing the similarity of negative samples, the model learns shared representations between images and texts. The proposed method is capable of effectively detecting specific liveness attack behaviors in certain scenarios, such as those occurring in dark environments or involving the tampering of ID card photos. Additionally, it is also effective in detecting traditional liveness attack methods, such as printing photo attacks and screen remake attacks. The zero-shot capabilities of face liveness detection on five public datasets, including NUAA, CASIA-FASD, Replay-Attack, OULU-NPU and MSU-MFSD also reaches the level of commercial algorithms. The detection capability of proposed algorithm was verified on 5 types of testing datasets, and the results show that the method outperformed commercial algorithms, and the detection rates reached 100% on multiple datasets. Demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of introducing image-text pairs and contrastive learning into liveness detection tasks as proposed in this paper.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Data-Centric Long-Tailed Image Recognition

In the context of the long-tail scenario, models exhibit a strong demand for high-quality data. Data-centric approaches aim to enhance both the quantity and quality of data to improve model performance. Among these approaches, information augmentation has been progressively introduced as a crucial category. It achieves a balance in model performance by augmenting the richness and quantity of samples in the tail classes. However, there is currently a lack of research into the underlying mechanisms explaining the effectiveness of information augmentation methods. Consequently, the utilization of information augmentation in long-tail recognition tasks relies heavily on empirical and intricate fine-tuning. This work makes two primary contributions. Firstly, we approach the problem from the perspectives of feature diversity and distribution shift, introducing the concept of Feature Diversity Gain (FDG) to elucidate why information augmentation is effective. We find that the performance of information augmentation can be explained by FDG, and its performance peaks when FDG achieves an appropriate balance. Experimental results demonstrate that by using FDG to select augmented data, we can further enhance model performance without the need for any modifications to the model's architecture. Thus, data-centric approaches hold significant potential in the field of long-tail recognition, beyond the development of new model structures. Furthermore, we systematically introduce the core components and fundamental tasks of a data-centric long-tail learning framework for the first time. These core components guide the implementation and deployment of the system, while the corresponding fundamental tasks refine and expand the research area.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

LargeST: A Benchmark Dataset for Large-Scale Traffic Forecasting

Road traffic forecasting plays a critical role in smart city initiatives and has experienced significant advancements thanks to the power of deep learning in capturing non-linear patterns of traffic data. However, the promising results achieved on current public datasets may not be applicable to practical scenarios due to limitations within these datasets. First, the limited sizes of them may not reflect the real-world scale of traffic networks. Second, the temporal coverage of these datasets is typically short, posing hurdles in studying long-term patterns and acquiring sufficient samples for training deep models. Third, these datasets often lack adequate metadata for sensors, which compromises the reliability and interpretability of the data. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce the LargeST benchmark dataset. It encompasses a total number of 8,600 sensors in California with a 5-year time coverage and includes comprehensive metadata. Using LargeST, we perform in-depth data analysis to extract data insights, benchmark well-known baselines in terms of their performance and efficiency, and identify challenges as well as opportunities for future research. We release the datasets and baseline implementations at: https://github.com/liuxu77/LargeST.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

RIS-based IMT-2030 Testbed for MmWave Multi-stream Ultra-massive MIMO Communications

As one enabling technique of the future sixth generation (6G) network, ultra-massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) can support high-speed data transmissions and cell coverage extension. However, it is hard to realize the ultra-massive MIMO via traditional phased arrays due to unacceptable power consumption. To address this issue, reconfigurable intelligent surface-based (RIS-based) antennas are an energy-efficient enabler of the ultra-massive MIMO, since they are free of energy-hungry phase shifters. In this article, we report the performances of the RIS-enabled ultra-massive MIMO via a project called Verification of MmWave Multi-stream Transmissions Enabled by RIS-based Ultra-massive MIMO for 6G (V4M), which was proposed to promote the evolution towards IMT-2030. In the V4M project, we manufacture RIS-based antennas with 1024 one-bit elements working at 26 GHz, based on which an mmWave dual-stream ultra-massive MIMO prototype is implemented for the first time. To approach practical settings, the Tx and Rx of the prototype are implemented by one commercial new radio base station and one off-the-shelf user equipment, respectively. The measured data rate of the dual-stream prototype approaches the theoretical peak rate. Our contributions to the V4M project are also discussed by presenting technological challenges and corresponding solutions.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2023

Orthogonal Uncertainty Representation of Data Manifold for Robust Long-Tailed Learning

In scenarios with long-tailed distributions, the model's ability to identify tail classes is limited due to the under-representation of tail samples. Class rebalancing, information augmentation, and other techniques have been proposed to facilitate models to learn the potential distribution of tail classes. The disadvantage is that these methods generally pursue models with balanced class accuracy on the data manifold, while ignoring the ability of the model to resist interference. By constructing noisy data manifold, we found that the robustness of models trained on unbalanced data has a long-tail phenomenon. That is, even if the class accuracy is balanced on the data domain, it still has bias on the noisy data manifold. However, existing methods cannot effectively mitigate the above phenomenon, which makes the model vulnerable in long-tailed scenarios. In this work, we propose an Orthogonal Uncertainty Representation (OUR) of feature embedding and an end-to-end training strategy to improve the long-tail phenomenon of model robustness. As a general enhancement tool, OUR has excellent compatibility with other methods and does not require additional data generation, ensuring fast and efficient training. Comprehensive evaluations on long-tailed datasets show that our method significantly improves the long-tail phenomenon of robustness, bringing consistent performance gains to other long-tailed learning methods.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

TreeScope: An Agricultural Robotics Dataset for LiDAR-Based Mapping of Trees in Forests and Orchards

Data collection for forestry, timber, and agriculture currently relies on manual techniques which are labor-intensive and time-consuming. We seek to demonstrate that robotics offers improvements over these techniques and accelerate agricultural research, beginning with semantic segmentation and diameter estimation of trees in forests and orchards. We present TreeScope v1.0, the first robotics dataset for precision agriculture and forestry addressing the counting and mapping of trees in forestry and orchards. TreeScope provides LiDAR data from agricultural environments collected with robotics platforms, such as UAV and mobile robot platforms carried by vehicles and human operators. In the first release of this dataset, we provide ground-truth data with over 1,800 manually annotated semantic labels for tree stems and field-measured tree diameters. We share benchmark scripts for these tasks that researchers may use to evaluate the accuracy of their algorithms. Finally, we run our open-source diameter estimation and off-the-shelf semantic segmentation algorithms and share our baseline results.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2023

Deciphering Spatio-Temporal Graph Forecasting: A Causal Lens and Treatment

Spatio-Temporal Graph (STG) forecasting is a fundamental task in many real-world applications. Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks have emerged as the most popular method for STG forecasting, but they often struggle with temporal out-of-distribution (OoD) issues and dynamic spatial causation. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called CaST to tackle these two challenges via causal treatments. Concretely, leveraging a causal lens, we first build a structural causal model to decipher the data generation process of STGs. To handle the temporal OoD issue, we employ the back-door adjustment by a novel disentanglement block to separate invariant parts and temporal environments from input data. Moreover, we utilize the front-door adjustment and adopt the Hodge-Laplacian operator for edge-level convolution to model the ripple effect of causation. Experiments results on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of CaST, which consistently outperforms existing methods with good interpretability.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

DWRSeg: Rethinking Efficient Acquisition of Multi-scale Contextual Information for Real-time Semantic Segmentation

Many current works directly adopt multi-rate depth-wise dilated convolutions to capture multi-scale contextual information simultaneously from one input feature map, thus improving the feature extraction efficiency for real-time semantic segmentation. However, this design may lead to difficult access to multi-scale contextual information because of the unreasonable structure and hyperparameters. To lower the difficulty of drawing multi-scale contextual information, we propose a highly efficient multi-scale feature extraction method, which decomposes the original single-step method into two steps, Region Residualization-Semantic Residualization. In this method, the multi-rate depth-wise dilated convolutions take a simpler role in feature extraction: performing simple semantic-based morphological filtering with one desired receptive field in the second step based on each concise feature map of region form provided by the first step, to improve their efficiency. Moreover, the dilation rates and the capacity of dilated convolutions for each network stage are elaborated to fully utilize all the feature maps of region form that can be achieved.Accordingly, we design a novel Dilation-wise Residual (DWR) module and a Simple Inverted Residual (SIR) module for the high and low level network, respectively, and form a powerful DWR Segmentation (DWRSeg) network. Extensive experiments on the Cityscapes and CamVid datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by achieving a state-of-the-art trade-off between accuracy and inference speed, in addition to being lighter weight. Without pretraining or resorting to any training trick, we achieve an mIoU of 72.7% on the Cityscapes test set at a speed of 319.5 FPS on one NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti card, which exceeds the latest methods of a speed of 69.5 FPS and 0.8% mIoU. The code and trained models are publicly available.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Polyimides Crosslinked by Aromatic Molecules and Nanocomposites for High Temperature Capacitive Energy Storage

High temperature polymer-based dielectric capacitors are crucial for application in electronic power systems. However, the storage performance of conventional dielectrics polymer dramatically deteriorates due to the thermal breakdown under concurrent high temperatures and electric fields, and there are hardly reports on the causes of thermal breakdown from the aspects of the high temperature conduction loss and Joule heat dissipation. Herein, a combined strategy of crosslinking and compositing for polyimide-based nanocomposites is proposed, which minimizes the thermal breakdown by significantly inhibiting the high-temperature conduction loss and enhancing the high thermal conductivity. Furthermore, the rationale of the strategy was theoretically and experimentally verified from multiple perspectives. The charge-trapping effect is directly observed and quantitatively probed by Kelvin probe force microscopy with nano level resolution, indicating that the crosslinking network introduces local deep traps and effectively suppresses the charge transport. The thermal conductivity of the nanocomposites inhibits the high temperature thermal breakdown, which is confirmed by phase field simulations. Consequently, the optimized nanocomposites possess an ultra high discharge energy density(Ud) of 5.45 J/cm3 and 3.54 J/cm3 with a charge discharge efficiency, respectively, which outperforms the reported polyimide based dielectric nanocomposites. This work provides a scalable direction for high temperature polymer based capacitors with excellent performance.

physics.app-ph↗
arXiv2023

FastPoseGait: A Toolbox and Benchmark for Efficient Pose-based Gait Recognition

We present FastPoseGait, an open-source toolbox for pose-based gait recognition based on PyTorch. Our toolbox supports a set of cutting-edge pose-based gait recognition algorithms and a variety of related benchmarks. Unlike other pose-based projects that focus on a single algorithm, FastPoseGait integrates several state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms under a unified framework, incorporating both the latest advancements and best practices to ease the comparison of effectiveness and efficiency. In addition, to promote future research on pose-based gait recognition, we provide numerous pre-trained models and detailed benchmark results, which offer valuable insights and serve as a reference for further investigations. By leveraging the highly modular structure and diverse methods offered by FastPoseGait, researchers can quickly delve into pose-based gait recognition and promote development in the field. In this paper, we outline various features of this toolbox, aiming that our toolbox and benchmarks can further foster collaboration, facilitate reproducibility, and encourage the development of innovative algorithms for pose-based gait recognition. FastPoseGait is available at https://github.com//BNU-IVC/FastPoseGait and is actively maintained. We will continue updating this report as we add new features.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Large-scale Autonomous Flight with Real-time Semantic SLAM under Dense Forest Canopy

Semantic maps represent the environment using a set of semantically meaningful objects. This representation is storage-efficient, less ambiguous, and more informative, thus facilitating large-scale autonomy and the acquisition of actionable information in highly unstructured, GPS-denied environments. In this letter, we propose an integrated system that can perform large-scale autonomous flights and real-time semantic mapping in challenging under-canopy environments. We detect and model tree trunks and ground planes from LiDAR data, which are associated across scans and used to constrain robot poses as well as tree trunk models. The autonomous navigation module utilizes a multi-level planning and mapping framework and computes dynamically feasible trajectories that lead the UAV to build a semantic map of the user-defined region of interest in a computationally and storage efficient manner. A drift-compensation mechanism is designed to minimize the odometry drift using semantic SLAM outputs in real time, while maintaining planner optimality and controller stability. This leads the UAV to execute its mission accurately and safely at scale.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2023

Multi-energy X-ray linear-array detector enabled by the side-illuminated metal halide scintillator

Conventional scintillator-based X-ray imaging typically captures the full spectral of X-ray photons without distinguishing their energy. However, the absence of X-ray spectral information often results in insufficient image contrast, particularly for substances possessing similar atomic numbers and densities. In this study, we present an innovative multi-energy X-ray linear-array detector that leverages side-illuminated X-ray scintillation using emerging metal halide Cs3Cu2I5. The negligible self-absorption characteristic not only improves the scintillation output but is also beneficial for improving the energy resolution for the side-illuminated scintillation scenarios. By exploiting Beer's law, which governs the absorption of X-ray photons with different energies, the incident X-ray spectral can be reconstructed by analyzing the distribution of scintillation intensity when the scintillator is illuminated from the side. The relative error between the reconstructed and measured X-ray spectral was less than 5.63 %. Our method offers an additional energy-resolving capability for X-ray linear-array detectors commonly used in computed tomography (CT) imaging setups, surpassing the capabilities of conventional energy-integration approaches, all without requiring extra hardware components. A proof-of-concept multi-energy CT imaging system featuring eight energy channels was successfully implemented. This study presents a simple and efficient strategy for achieving multi-energy X-ray detection and CT imaging based on emerging metal halides.

physics.ins-det↗
arXiv2023

Robust Localization of Aerial Vehicles via Active Control of Identical Ground Vehicles

This paper addresses the problem of active collaborative localization in heterogeneous robot teams with unknown data association. It involves positioning a small number of identical unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) at desired positions so that an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can, through unlabelled measurements of UGVs, uniquely determine its global pose. We model the problem as a sequential two player game, in which the first player positions the UGVs and the second identifies the two distinct hypothetical poses of the UAV at which the sets of measurements to the UGVs differ by as little as possible. We solve the underlying problem from the vantage point of the first player for a subclass of measurement models using a mixture of local optimization and exhaustive search procedures. Real-world experiments with a team of UAV and UGVs show that our method can achieve centimeter-level global localization accuracy. We also show that our method consistently outperforms random positioning of UGVs by a large margin, with as much as a 90% reduction in position and angular estimation error. Our method can tolerate a significant amount of random as well as non-stochastic measurement noise. This indicates its potential for reliable state estimation on board size, weight, and power (SWaP) constrained UAVs. This work enables robust localization in perceptually-challenged GPS-denied environments, thus paving the road for large-scale multi-robot navigation and mapping.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2023

Active Metric-Semantic Mapping by Multiple Aerial Robots

Traditional approaches for active mapping focus on building geometric maps. For most real-world applications, however, actionable information is related to semantically meaningful objects in the environment. We propose an approach to the active metric-semantic mapping problem that enables multiple heterogeneous robots to collaboratively build a map of the environment. The robots actively explore to minimize the uncertainties in both semantic (object classification) and geometric (object modeling) information. We represent the environment using informative but sparse object models, each consisting of a basic shape and a semantic class label, and characterize uncertainties empirically using a large amount of real-world data. Given a prior map, we use this model to select actions for each robot to minimize uncertainties. The performance of our algorithm is demonstrated through multi-robot experiments in diverse real-world environments. The proposed framework is applicable to a wide range of real-world problems, such as precision agriculture, infrastructure inspection, and asset mapping in factories. A demo video can be found at https://youtu.be/S86SgXi54oU.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2023

Balanced Coarsening for Multilevel Hypergraph Partitioning via Wasserstein Discrepancy

We propose a balanced coarsening scheme for multilevel hypergraph partitioning. In addition, an initial partitioning algorithm is designed to improve the quality of k-way hypergraph partitioning. By assigning vertex weights through the LPT algorithm, we generate a prior hypergraph under a relaxed balance constraint. With the prior hypergraph, we have defined the Wasserstein discrepancy to coordinate the optimal transport of coarsening process. And the optimal transport matrix is solved by Sinkhorn algorithm. Our coarsening scheme fully takes into account the minimization of connectivity metric (objective function). For the initial partitioning stage, we define a normalized cut function induced by Fiedler vector, which is theoretically proved to be a concave function. Thereby, a three-point algorithm is designed to find the best cut under the balance constraint.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2023

TorchBench: Benchmarking PyTorch with High API Surface Coverage

Deep learning (DL) has been a revolutionary technique in various domains. To facilitate the model development and deployment, many deep learning frameworks are proposed, among which PyTorch is one of the most popular solutions. The performance of ecosystem around PyTorch is critically important, which saves the costs of training models and reduces the response time of model inferences. In this paper, we propose TorchBench, a novel benchmark suite to study the performance of PyTorch software stack. Unlike existing benchmark suites, TorchBench encloses many representative models, covering a large PyTorch API surface. TorchBench is able to comprehensively characterize the performance of the PyTorch software stack, guiding the performance optimization across models, PyTorch framework, and GPU libraries. We show two practical use cases of TorchBench. (1) We profile TorchBench to identify GPU performance inefficiencies in PyTorch. We are able to optimize many performance bugs and upstream patches to the official PyTorch repository. (2) We integrate TorchBench into PyTorch continuous integration system. We are able to identify performance regression in multiple daily code checkins to prevent PyTorch repository from introducing performance bugs. TorchBench is open source and keeps evolving.

cs.LG↗