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Yu Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Yu Yang.

At least 199 records · Page 11Linked to original sources

Feasibility of Local Trajectory Planning for Level-2+ Semi-autonomous Driving without Absolute Localization

Autonomous driving has long grappled with the need for precise absolute localization, making full autonomy elusive and raising the capital entry barriers for startups. This study delves into the feasibility of local trajectory planning for level-2+ (L2+) semi-autonomous vehicles without the dependence on accurate absolute localization. Instead, we emphasize the estimation of the pose change between consecutive planning frames from motion sensors and integration of relative locations of traffic objects to the local planning problem under the ego car's local coordinate system, therefore eliminating the need for an absolute localization. Without the availability of absolute localization for correction, the measurement errors of speed and yaw rate greatly affect the estimation accuracy of the relative pose change between frames. We proved that the feasibility/stability of the continuous planning problem under such motion sensor errors can be guaranteed at certain defined conditions. This was achieved by formulating it as a Lyapunov-stability analysis problem. Moreover, a simulation pipeline was developed to further validate the proposed local planning method. Simulations were conducted at two traffic scenes with different error settings for speed and yaw rate measurements. The results substantiate the proposed framework's functionality even under relatively inferior sensor errors. We also experiment the stability limits of the planned results under abnormally larger motion sensor errors. The results provide a good match to the previous theoretical analysis. Our findings suggested that precise absolute localization may not be the sole path to achieving reliable trajectory planning, eliminating the necessity for high-accuracy dual-antenna GPS as well as the high-fidelity maps for SLAM localization.

cs.RO↗

Parallel Knowledge Enhancement based Framework for Multi-behavior Recommendation

Multi-behavior recommendation algorithms aim to leverage the multiplex interactions between users and items to learn users' latent preferences. Recent multi-behavior recommendation frameworks contain two steps: fusion and prediction. In the fusion step, advanced neural networks are used to model the hierarchical correlations between user behaviors. In the prediction step, multiple signals are utilized to jointly optimize the model with a multi-task learning (MTL) paradigm. However, recent approaches have not addressed the issue caused by imbalanced data distribution in the fusion step, resulting in the learned relationships being dominated by high-frequency behaviors. In the prediction step, the existing methods use a gate mechanism to directly aggregate expert information generated by coupling input, leading to negative information transfer. To tackle these issues, we propose a Parallel Knowledge Enhancement Framework (PKEF) for multi-behavior recommendation. Specifically, we enhance the hierarchical information propagation in the fusion step using parallel knowledge (PKF). Meanwhile, in the prediction step, we decouple the representations to generate expert information and introduce a projection mechanism during aggregation to eliminate gradient conflicts and alleviate negative transfer (PME). We conduct comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets to validate the effectiveness of our model. The results further demonstrate the rationality and effectiveness of the designed PKF and PME modules. The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/MC-CV/PKEF.

cs.IR↗

Friendly Noise against Adversarial Noise: A Powerful Defense against Data Poisoning Attacks

A powerful category of (invisible) data poisoning attacks modify a subset of training examples by small adversarial perturbations to change the prediction of certain test-time data. Existing defense mechanisms are not desirable to deploy in practice, as they often either drastically harm the generalization performance, or are attack-specific, and prohibitively slow to apply. Here, we propose a simple but highly effective approach that unlike existing methods breaks various types of invisible poisoning attacks with the slightest drop in the generalization performance. We make the key observation that attacks introduce local sharp regions of high training loss, which when minimized, results in learning the adversarial perturbations and makes the attack successful. To break poisoning attacks, our key idea is to alleviate the sharp loss regions introduced by poisons. To do so, our approach comprises two components: an optimized friendly noise that is generated to maximally perturb examples without degrading the performance, and a randomly varying noise component. The combination of both components builds a very light-weight but extremely effective defense against the most powerful triggerless targeted and hidden-trigger backdoor poisoning attacks, including Gradient Matching, Bulls-eye Polytope, and Sleeper Agent. We show that our friendly noise is transferable to other architectures, and adaptive attacks cannot break our defense due to its random noise component. Our code is available at: https://github.com/tianyu139/friendly-noise

cs.CR↗

CleanCLIP: Mitigating Data Poisoning Attacks in Multimodal Contrastive Learning

Multimodal contrastive pretraining has been used to train multimodal representation models, such as CLIP, on large amounts of paired image-text data. However, previous studies have revealed that such models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Specifically, when trained on backdoored examples, CLIP learns spurious correlations between the embedded backdoor trigger and the target label, aligning their representations in the joint embedding space. Injecting even a small number of poisoned examples, such as 75 examples in 3 million pretraining data, can significantly manipulate the model's behavior, making it difficult to detect or unlearn such correlations. To address this issue, we propose CleanCLIP, a finetuning framework that weakens the learned spurious associations introduced by backdoor attacks by independently re-aligning the representations for individual modalities. We demonstrate that unsupervised finetuning using a combination of multimodal contrastive and unimodal self-supervised objectives for individual modalities can significantly reduce the impact of the backdoor attack. Additionally, we show that supervised finetuning on task-specific labeled image data removes the backdoor trigger from the CLIP vision encoder. We show empirically that CleanCLIP maintains model performance on benign examples while erasing a range of backdoor attacks on multimodal contrastive learning. The code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/nishadsinghi/CleanCLIP.

cs.CV↗

Neural Networks Based on Power Method and Inverse Power Method for Solving Linear Eigenvalue Problems

In this article, we propose two kinds of neural networks inspired by power method and inverse power method to solve linear eigenvalue problems. These neural networks share similar ideas with traditional methods, in which the differential operator is realized by automatic differentiation. The eigenfunction of the eigenvalue problem is learned by the neural network and the iterative algorithms are implemented by optimizing the specially defined loss function. The largest positive eigenvalue, smallest eigenvalue and interior eigenvalues with the given prior knowledge can be solved efficiently. We examine the applicability and accuracy of our methods in the numerical experiments in one dimension, two dimensions and higher dimensions. Numerical results show that accurate eigenvalue and eigenfunction approximations can be obtained by our methods.

math.NA↗

PANet: LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation with Sparse Instance Proposal and Aggregation

Reliable LiDAR panoptic segmentation (LPS), including both semantic and instance segmentation, is vital for many robotic applications, such as autonomous driving. This work proposes a new LPS framework named PANet to eliminate the dependency on the offset branch and improve the performance on large objects, which are always over-segmented by clustering algorithms. Firstly, we propose a non-learning Sparse Instance Proposal (SIP) module with the ``sampling-shifting-grouping" scheme to directly group thing points into instances from the raw point cloud efficiently. More specifically, balanced point sampling is introduced to generate sparse seed points with more uniform point distribution over the distance range. And a shift module, termed bubble shifting, is proposed to shrink the seed points to the clustered centers. Then we utilize the connected component label algorithm to generate instance proposals. Furthermore, an instance aggregation module is devised to integrate potentially fragmented instances, improving the performance of the SIP module on large objects. Extensive experiments show that PANet achieves state-of-the-art performance among published works on the SemanticKITII validation and nuScenes validation for the panoptic segmentation task.

cs.CV↗

SSC-RS: Elevate LiDAR Semantic Scene Completion with Representation Separation and BEV Fusion

Semantic scene completion (SSC) jointly predicts the semantics and geometry of the entire 3D scene, which plays an essential role in 3D scene understanding for autonomous driving systems. SSC has achieved rapid progress with the help of semantic context in segmentation. However, how to effectively exploit the relationships between the semantic context in semantic segmentation and geometric structure in scene completion remains under exploration. In this paper, we propose to solve outdoor SSC from the perspective of representation separation and BEV fusion. Specifically, we present the network, named SSC-RS, which uses separate branches with deep supervision to explicitly disentangle the learning procedure of the semantic and geometric representations. And a BEV fusion network equipped with the proposed Adaptive Representation Fusion (ARF) module is presented to aggregate the multi-scale features effectively and efficiently. Due to the low computational burden and powerful representation ability, our model has good generality while running in real-time. Extensive experiments on SemanticKITTI demonstrate our SSC-RS achieves state-of-the-art performance.

cs.CV↗

Towards Sustainable Learning: Coresets for Data-efficient Deep Learning

To improve the efficiency and sustainability of learning deep models, we propose CREST, the first scalable framework with rigorous theoretical guarantees to identify the most valuable examples for training non-convex models, particularly deep networks. To guarantee convergence to a stationary point of a non-convex function, CREST models the non-convex loss as a series of quadratic functions and extracts a coreset for each quadratic sub-region. In addition, to ensure faster convergence of stochastic gradient methods such as (mini-batch) SGD, CREST iteratively extracts multiple mini-batch coresets from larger random subsets of training data, to ensure nearly-unbiased gradients with small variances. Finally, to further improve scalability and efficiency, CREST identifies and excludes the examples that are learned from the coreset selection pipeline. Our extensive experiments on several deep networks trained on vision and NLP datasets, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, TinyImageNet, and SNLI, confirm that CREST speeds up training deep networks on very large datasets, by 1.7x to 2.5x with minimum loss in the performance. By analyzing the learning difficulty of the subsets selected by CREST, we show that deep models benefit the most by learning from subsets of increasing difficulty levels.

cs.LG↗

Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Multi-modal Models during Fine-tuning

Spurious correlations that degrade model generalization or lead the model to be right for the wrong reasons are one of the main robustness concerns for real-world deployments. However, mitigating these correlations during pre-training for large-scale models can be costly and impractical, particularly for those without access to high-performance computing resources. This paper proposes a novel approach to address spurious correlations during fine-tuning for a given domain of interest. With a focus on multi-modal models (e.g., CLIP), the proposed method leverages different modalities in these models to detect and explicitly set apart spurious attributes from the affected class, achieved through a multi-modal contrastive loss function that expresses spurious relationships through language. Our experimental results and in-depth visualizations on CLIP show that such an intervention can effectively i) improve the model's accuracy when spurious attributes are not present, and ii) directs the model's activation maps towards the actual class rather than the spurious attribute when present. In particular, on the Waterbirds dataset, our algorithm achieved a worst-group accuracy 23% higher than ERM on CLIP with a ResNet-50 backbone, and 32% higher on CLIP with a ViT backbone, while maintaining the same average accuracy as ERM.

cs.LG↗

On the uncertainty analysis of the data-enabled physics-informed neural network for solving neutron diffusion eigenvalue problem

In practical engineering experiments, the data obtained through detectors are inevitably noisy. For the already proposed data-enabled physics-informed neural network (DEPINN) \citep{DEPINN}, we investigate the performance of DEPINN in calculating the neutron diffusion eigenvalue problem from several perspectives when the prior data contain different scales of noise. Further, in order to reduce the effect of noise and improve the utilization of the noisy prior data, we propose innovative interval loss functions and give some rigorous mathematical proofs. The robustness of DEPINN is examined on two typical benchmark problems through a large number of numerical results, and the effectiveness of the proposed interval loss function is demonstrated by comparison. This paper confirms the feasibility of the improved DEPINN for practical engineering applications in nuclear reactor physics.

cs.LG↗

Time-aware Dynamic Graph Embedding for Asynchronous Structural Evolution

Dynamic graphs refer to graphs whose structure dynamically changes over time. Despite the benefits of learning vertex representations (i.e., embeddings) for dynamic graphs, existing works merely view a dynamic graph as a sequence of changes within the vertex connections, neglecting the crucial asynchronous nature of such dynamics where the evolution of each local structure starts at different times and lasts for various durations. To maintain asynchronous structural evolutions within the graph, we innovatively formulate dynamic graphs as temporal edge sequences associated with joining time of vertices (ToV) and timespan of edges (ToE). Then, a time-aware Transformer is proposed to embed vertices' dynamic connections and ToEs into the learned vertex representations. Meanwhile, we treat each edge sequence as a whole and embed its ToV of the first vertex to further encode the time-sensitive information. Extensive evaluations on several datasets show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in a wide range of graph mining tasks. At the same time, it is very efficient and scalable for embedding large-scale dynamic graphs.

cs.LG↗

Engineering phonon-phonon interactions in multimode circuit quantum acousto-dynamics

In recent years, remarkable progress has been made towards encoding and processing quantum information in the large Hilbert space of bosonic modes. Mechanical resonators are of great interest for this purpose, since they confine many high quality factor modes into a small volume and can be easily integrated with many different quantum systems. An important yet challenging task is to create direct interactions between different mechanical modes. Here we demonstrate an in-situ tunable beam-splitter-type interaction between several mechanical modes of a high-overtone bulk acoustic wave resonator. The engineered interaction is mediated by a parametrically driven superconducting transmon qubit, and we show that it can be tailored to couple pairs or triplets of phononic modes. Furthermore, we use this interaction to demonstrate the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect between phonons. Our results lay the foundations for using phononic systems as quantum memories and platforms for quantum simulations.

quant-ph↗

Battery Valuation and Management for Battery Swapping Station with an Intertemporal Framework

Battery swapping as a business model for battery energy storage (BES) has great potential in future integrated low-carbon energy and transportation systems. However, frequent battery swapping will inevitably accelerate battery degradation and shorten the battery life accordingly. To model the tradeoff of BES use between energy and transportation applications coupled by battery swapping, we develop a life-cycle decision model that coordinates battery charging and swapping. This model is derived based on an improved intertemporal decision framework, in which the optimal marginal degradation cost (MDC) of BES is determined to maximize the BES benefit across time and application. The proposed framework and model are applied to manage a battery swapping station that simultaneously provides battery swapping services to electric vehicle customers and provides flexibility service to the power grid, including energy arbitrage and reserve. The case study shows that while the end of the physical life of BES occurs faster with battery swapping, the economic life becomes considerably longer. The results also reveal that the optimal MDC depends on the battery values in each application, and we analyze how the battery swapping price affects the optimal MDC and battery life. The proposed framework and model can also provide decision support for on-demand BES service, such as battery trading, renting and secondary use.

eess.SY↗

Macroscopic quantum test with bulk acoustic wave resonators

Recently, solid-state mechanical resonators have become a platform for demonstrating non-classical behavior of systems involving a truly macroscopic number of particles. Here, we perform the most macroscopic quantum test in a mechanical resonator to date, which probes the validity of quantum mechanics at the microgram mass scale. This is done by a direct measurement of the Wigner function of a high-overtone bulk acoustic wave resonator mode, monitoring the gradual decay of negativities over tens of microseconds. While the obtained macroscopicity of $μ= 11.3$ is on par with state-of-the-art atom interferometers, future improvements of mode geometry and coherence times could confirm the quantum superposition principle at unprecedented scales.

quant-ph↗

Topological Structures of Moduli Spaces of Curves and Anabelian Geometry in Positive Characteristic

In the present paper, we study a new kind of anabelian phenomenon concerning the smooth pointed stable curves in positive characteristic. It shows that the topological structures of moduli spaces of curves can be understood from the viewpoint of anabelian geometry. We formulate some new anabelian-geometric conjectures relating the tame fundamental groups of curves over algebraically closed fields of characteristic $p>0$ to the moduli spaces of curves. These conjectures are generalized versions of the weak Isom-version of the Grothendieck conjecture for curves over algebraically closed fields of characteristic $p>0$ which was formulated by Tamagawa. Moreover, we prove that the conjectures hold for certain points lying in the moduli space of curves of genus $0$.

math.AG↗

Untwining multiple parameters at the exclusive zero-coincidence points with quantum control

In this paper we address a special case of "sloppy" quantum estimation procedures which happens in the presence of intertwined parameters. A collection of parameters are said to be intertwined when their imprinting on the quantum probe that mediates the estimation procedure, is performed by a set of linearly dependent generators. Under this circumstance the individual values of the parameters can not be recovered unless one tampers with the encoding process itself. An example is presented by studying the estimation of the relative time-delays that accumulate along two parallel optical transmission lines. In this case we show that the parameters can be effectively untwined by inserting a sequence of balanced beam splitters (and eventually adding an extra phase shift on one of the lines) that couples the two lines at regular intervals in a setup that remind us a generalized Hong-Ou-Mandel (GHOM) interferometer. For the case of two time delays we prove that, when the employed probe is the frequency-correlated biphoton state, the untwining occurs in correspondence of exclusive zero-coincidence (EZC) point. Furthermore we show the statistical independence of two time delays and the optimality of the quantum Fisher information at the EZC point. Finally we prove the compatibility of this scheme by checking the weak commutativity condition associated with the symmetric logarithmic derivative operators.

quant-ph↗

Eff-3DPSeg: 3D organ-level plant shoot segmentation using annotation-efficient point clouds

Reliable and automated 3D plant shoot segmentation is a core prerequisite for the extraction of plant phenotypic traits at the organ level. Combining deep learning and point clouds can provide effective ways to address the challenge. However, fully supervised deep learning methods require datasets to be point-wise annotated, which is extremely expensive and time-consuming. In our work, we proposed a novel weakly supervised framework, Eff-3DPSeg, for 3D plant shoot segmentation. First, high-resolution point clouds of soybean were reconstructed using a low-cost photogrammetry system, and the Meshlab-based Plant Annotator was developed for plant point cloud annotation. Second, a weakly-supervised deep learning method was proposed for plant organ segmentation. The method contained: (1) Pretraining a self-supervised network using Viewpoint Bottleneck loss to learn meaningful intrinsic structure representation from the raw point clouds; (2) Fine-tuning the pre-trained model with about only 0.5% points being annotated to implement plant organ segmentation. After, three phenotypic traits (stem diameter, leaf width, and leaf length) were extracted. To test the generality of the proposed method, the public dataset Pheno4D was included in this study. Experimental results showed that the weakly-supervised network obtained similar segmentation performance compared with the fully-supervised setting. Our method achieved 95.1%, 96.6%, 95.8% and 92.2% in the Precision, Recall, F1-score, and mIoU for stem leaf segmentation and 53%, 62.8% and 70.3% in the AP, AP@25, and AP@50 for leaf instance segmentation. This study provides an effective way for characterizing 3D plant architecture, which will become useful for plant breeders to enhance selection processes.

cs.CV↗

Machine Learning for Smart and Energy-Efficient Buildings

Energy consumption in buildings, both residential and commercial, accounts for approximately 40% of all energy usage in the U.S., and similar numbers are being reported from countries around the world. This significant amount of energy is used to maintain a comfortable, secure, and productive environment for the occupants. So, it is crucial that the energy consumption in buildings must be optimized, all the while maintaining satisfactory levels of occupant comfort, health, and safety. Recently, Machine Learning has been proven to be an invaluable tool in deriving important insights from data and optimizing various systems. In this work, we review the ways in which machine learning has been leveraged to make buildings smart and energy-efficient. For the convenience of readers, we provide a brief introduction of several machine learning paradigms and the components and functioning of each smart building system we cover. Finally, we discuss challenges faced while implementing machine learning algorithms in smart buildings and provide future avenues for research at the intersection of smart buildings and machine learning.

cs.LG↗