arXiv subjects

Zhijun Li

Publications and source records attributed to Zhijun Li.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Research on the Impact of Executive Shareholding on New Investment in Enterprises Based on Multivariable Linear Regression Model

Based on principal-agent theory and optimal contract theory, companies use the method of increasing executives' shareholding to stimulate collaborative innovation. However, from the aspect of agency costs between management and shareholders (i.e. the first type) and between major shareholders and minority shareholders (i.e. the second type), the interests of management, shareholders and creditors will be unbalanced with the change of the marginal utility of executive equity incentives.In order to establish the correlation between the proportion of shares held by executives and investments in corporate innovation, we have chosen a range of publicly listed companies within China's A-share market as the focus of our study. Employing a multi-variable linear regression model, we aim to analyze this relationship thoroughly.The following models were developed: (1) the impact model of executive shareholding on corporate innovation investment; (2) the impact model of executive shareholding on two types of agency costs; (3)The model is employed to examine the mediating influence of the two categories of agency costs. Following both correlation and regression analyses, the findings confirm a meaningful and positive correlation between executives' shareholding and the augmentation of corporate innovation investments. Additionally, the results indicate that executive shareholding contributes to the reduction of the first type of agency cost, thereby fostering corporate innovation investment. However, simultaneously, it leads to an escalation in the second type of agency cost, thus impeding corporate innovation investment.

math.NA↗

arXiv2023

TMA: Temporal Motion Aggregation for Event-based Optical Flow

Event cameras have the ability to record continuous and detailed trajectories of objects with high temporal resolution, thereby providing intuitive motion cues for optical flow estimation. Nevertheless, most existing learning-based approaches for event optical flow estimation directly remould the paradigm of conventional images by representing the consecutive event stream as static frames, ignoring the inherent temporal continuity of event data. In this paper, we argue that temporal continuity is a vital element of event-based optical flow and propose a novel Temporal Motion Aggregation (TMA) approach to unlock its potential. Technically, TMA comprises three components: an event splitting strategy to incorporate intermediate motion information underlying the temporal context, a linear lookup strategy to align temporally fine-grained motion features and a novel motion pattern aggregation module to emphasize consistent patterns for motion feature enhancement. By incorporating temporally fine-grained motion information, TMA can derive better flow estimates than existing methods at early stages, which not only enables TMA to obtain more accurate final predictions, but also greatly reduces the demand for a number of refinements. Extensive experiments on DSEC-Flow and MVSEC datasets verify the effectiveness and superiority of our TMA. Remarkably, compared to E-RAFT, TMA achieves a 6\% improvement in accuracy and a 40\% reduction in inference time on DSEC-Flow. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/ispc-lab/TMA}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Vision-Based Reactive Planning and Control of Quadruped Robots in Unstructured Dynamic Environments

Quadruped robots have received increasing attention for the past few years. However, existing works primarily focus on static environments or assume the robot has full observations of the environment. This limits their practical applications since real-world environments are often dynamic and partially observable. To tackle these issues, vision-based reactive planning and control (V-RPC) is developed in this work. The V-RPC comprises two modules: offline pre-planning and online reactive planning. The pre-planning phase generates a reference trajectory over continuous workspace via sampling-based methods using prior environmental knowledge, given an LTL specification. The online reactive module dynamically adjusts the reference trajectory and control based on the robot's real-time visual perception to adapt to environmental changes.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Reinforcement Learning Based Temporal Logic Control with Soft Constraints Using Limit-deterministic Generalized Buchi Automata

This paper studies the control synthesis of motion planning subject to uncertainties. The uncertainties are considered in robot motions and environment properties, giving rise to the probabilistic labeled Markov decision process (PL-MDP). A Model-Free Reinforcement The learning (RL) method is developed to generate a finite-memory control policy to satisfy high-level tasks expressed in linear temporal logic (LTL) formulas. Due to uncertainties and potentially conflicting tasks, this work focuses on infeasible LTL specifications, where a relaxed LTL constraint is developed to allow the agent to revise its motion plan and take violations of original tasks into account for partial satisfaction. And a novel automaton is developed to improve the density of accepting rewards and enable deterministic policies. We proposed an RL framework with rigorous analysis that is guaranteed to achieve multiple objectives in decreasing order: 1) satisfying the acceptance condition of relaxed product MDP and 2) reducing the violation cost over long-term behaviors. We provide simulation and experimental results to validate the performance.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2022

Comprehensive Review of Deep Learning-Based 3D Point Cloud Completion Processing and Analysis

Point cloud completion is a generation and estimation issue derived from the partial point clouds, which plays a vital role in the applications in 3D computer vision. The progress of deep learning (DL) has impressively improved the capability and robustness of point cloud completion. However, the quality of completed point clouds is still needed to be further enhanced to meet the practical utilization. Therefore, this work aims to conduct a comprehensive survey on various methods, including point-based, convolution-based, graph-based, and generative model-based approaches, etc. And this survey summarizes the comparisons among these methods to provoke further research insights. Besides, this review sums up the commonly used datasets and illustrates the applications of point cloud completion. Eventually, we also discussed possible research trends in this promptly expanding field.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Edge-Cloud Cooperation for DNN Inference via Reinforcement Learning and Supervised Learning

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been widely applied in Internet of Things (IoT) systems for various tasks such as image classification and object detection. However, heavyweight DNN models can hardly be deployed on edge devices due to limited computational resources. In this paper, an edge-cloud cooperation framework is proposed to improve inference accuracy while maintaining low inference latency. To this end, we deploy a lightweight model on the edge and a heavyweight model on the cloud. A reinforcement learning (RL)-based DNN compression approach is used to generate the lightweight model suitable for the edge from the heavyweight model. Moreover, a supervised learning (SL)-based offloading strategy is applied to determine whether the sample should be processed on the edge or on the cloud. Our method is implemented on real hardware and tested on multiple datasets. The experimental results show that (1) The sizes of the lightweight models obtained by RL-based DNN compression are up to 87.6% smaller than those obtained by the baseline method; (2) SL-based offloading strategy makes correct offloading decisions in most cases; (3) Our method reduces up to 78.8% inference latency and achieves higher accuracy compared with the cloud-only strategy.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

BMD: A General Class-balanced Multicentric Dynamic Prototype Strategy for Source-free Domain Adaptation

Source-free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) aims to adapt a pre-trained source model to the unlabeled target domain without accessing the well-labeled source data, which is a much more practical setting due to the data privacy, security, and transmission issues. To make up for the absence of source data, most existing methods introduced feature prototype based pseudo-labeling strategies to realize self-training model adaptation. However, feature prototypes are obtained by instance-level predictions based feature clustering, which is category-biased and tends to result in noisy labels since the visual domain gaps between source and target are usually different between categories. In addition, we found that a monocentric feature prototype may be ineffective to represent each category and introduce negative transfer, especially for those hard-transfer data. To address these issues, we propose a general class-Balanced Multicentric Dynamic prototype (BMD) strategy for the SFDA task. Specifically, for each target category, we first introduce a global inter-class balanced sampling strategy to aggregate potential representative target samples. Then, we design an intra-class multicentric clustering strategy to achieve more robust and representative prototypes generation. In contrast to existing strategies that update the pseudo label at a fixed training period, we further introduce a dynamic pseudo labeling strategy to incorporate network update information during model adaptation. Extensive experiments show that the proposed model-agnostic BMD strategy significantly improves representative SFDA methods to yield new state-of-the-art results. The code is available at https://github.com/ispc-lab/BMD.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Optimal Probabilistic Motion Planning with Potential Infeasible LTL Constraints

This paper studies optimal motion planning subject to motion and environment uncertainties. By modeling the system as a probabilistic labeled Markov decision process (PL-MDP), the control objective is to synthesize a finite-memory policy, under which the agent satisfies complex high-level tasks expressed as linear temporal logic (LTL) with desired satisfaction probability. In particular, the cost optimization of the trajectory that satisfies infinite horizon tasks is considered, and the trade-off between reducing the expected mean cost and maximizing the probability of task satisfaction is analyzed. Instead of using traditional Rabin automata, the LTL formulas are converted to limit-deterministic Büchi automata (LDBA) with a reachability acceptance condition and a compact graph structure. The novelty of this work lies in considering the cases where LTL specifications can be potentially infeasible and developing a relaxed product MDP between PL-MDP and LDBA. The relaxed product MDP allows the agent to revise its motion plan whenever the task is not fully feasible and quantify the revised plan's violation measurement. A multi-objective optimization problem is then formulated to jointly consider the probability of task satisfaction, the violation with respect to original task constraints, and the implementation cost of the policy execution. The formulated problem can be solved via coupled linear programs. To the best of our knowledge, this work first bridges the gap between probabilistic planning revision of potential infeasible LTL specifications and optimal control synthesis of both plan prefix and plan suffix of the trajectory over the infinite horizons. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

Receding Horizon Control Based Online Motion Planning with Partially Infeasible LTL Specifications

This work considers online optimal motion planning of an autonomous agent subject to linear temporal logic (LTL) constraints. The environment is dynamic in the sense of containing mobile obstacles and time-varying areas of interest (i.e., time-varying reward and workspace properties) to be visited by the agent. Since user-specified tasks may not be fully realized (i.e., partially infeasible), this work considers hard and soft LTL constraints, where hard constraints enforce safety requirement (e.g. avoid obstacles) while soft constraints represent tasks that can be relaxed to not strictly follow user specifications. The motion planning of the agent is to generate policies, in decreasing order of priority, to 1) formally guarantee the satisfaction of safety constraints; 2) mostly satisfy soft constraints (i.e., minimize the violation cost if desired tasks are partially infeasible); and 3) optimize the objective of rewards collection (i.e., visiting dynamic areas of more interests). To achieve these objectives, a relaxed product automaton, which allows the agent to not strictly follow the desired LTL constraints, is constructed. A utility function is developed to quantify the differences between the revised and the desired motion plan, and the accumulated rewards are designed to bias the motion plan towards those areas of more interests. Receding horizon control is synthesized with an LTL formula to maximize the accumulated utilities over a finite horizon, while ensuring that safety constraints are fully satisfied and soft constraints are mostly satisfied. Simulation and experiment results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed motion strategy.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

Edge-Cloud Collaborated Object Detection via Difficult-Case Discriminator

As one of the basic tasks of computer vision, object detection has been widely used in many intelligent applications. However, object detection algorithms are usually heavyweight in computation, hindering their implementations on resource-constrained edge devices. Current edge-cloud collaboration methods, such as CNN partition over Edge-cloud devices, are not suitable for object detection since the huge data size of the intermediate results will introduce extravagant communication costs. To address this challenge, we propose a small-big model framework that deploys a big model in the cloud and a small model on the edge devices. Upon receiving data, the edge device operates a difficult-case discriminator to classify the images into easy cases and difficult cases according to the specific semantics of the images. The easy cases will be processed locally at the edge, and the difficult cases will be uploaded to the cloud. Experimental results on the VOC, COCO, HELMET datasets using two different object detection algorithms demonstrate that the small-big model system can detect 94.01%-97.84% of objects with only about 50% images uploaded to the cloud when using SSD. In addition, the small-big model averagely reaches 91.22%- 92.52% end-to-end mAP of the scheme that uploading all images to the cloud.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

ACM-Net: Action Context Modeling Network for Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization

Weakly-supervised temporal action localization aims to localize action instances temporal boundary and identify the corresponding action category with only video-level labels. Traditional methods mainly focus on foreground and background frames separation with only a single attention branch and class activation sequence. However, we argue that apart from the distinctive foreground and background frames there are plenty of semantically ambiguous action context frames. It does not make sense to group those context frames to the same background class since they are semantically related to a specific action category. Consequently, it is challenging to suppress action context frames with only a single class activation sequence. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose an action-context modeling network termed ACM-Net, which integrates a three-branch attention module to measure the likelihood of each temporal point being action instance, context, or non-action background, simultaneously. Then based on the obtained three-branch attention values, we construct three-branch class activation sequences to represent the action instances, contexts, and non-action backgrounds, individually. To evaluate the effectiveness of our ACM-Net, we conduct extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, THUMOS-14 and ActivityNet-1.3. The experiments show that our method can outperform current state-of-the-art methods, and even achieve comparable performance with fully-supervised methods. Code can be found at https://github.com/ispc-lab/ACM-Net

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network with Gaussian-based Grasping Representation for Robotic Grasping Detection

The method of deep learning has achieved excellent results in improving the performance of robotic grasping detection. However, the deep learning methods used in general object detection are not suitable for robotic grasping detection. Current modern object detectors are difficult to strike a balance between high accuracy and fast inference speed. In this paper, we present an efficient and robust fully convolutional neural network model to perform robotic grasping pose estimation from an n-channel input image of the real grasping scene. The proposed network is a lightweight generative architecture for grasping detection in one stage. Specifically, a grasping representation based on Gaussian kernel is introduced to encode training samples, which embodies the principle of maximum central point grasping confidence. Meanwhile, to extract multi-scale information and enhance the feature discriminability, a receptive field block (RFB) is assembled to the bottleneck of our grasping detection architecture. Besides, pixel attention and channel attention are combined to automatically learn to focus on fusing context information of varying shapes and sizes by suppressing the noise feature and highlighting the grasping object feature. Extensive experiments on two public grasping datasets, Cornell and Jacquard demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method in balancing accuracy and inference speed. The network is an order of magnitude smaller than other excellent algorithms while achieving better performance with an accuracy of 98.9$\%$ and 95.6$\%$ on the Cornell and Jacquard datasets, respectively.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

PointINet: Point Cloud Frame Interpolation Network

LiDAR point cloud streams are usually sparse in time dimension, which is limited by hardware performance. Generally, the frame rates of mechanical LiDAR sensors are 10 to 20 Hz, which is much lower than other commonly used sensors like cameras. To overcome the temporal limitations of LiDAR sensors, a novel task named Point Cloud Frame Interpolation is studied in this paper. Given two consecutive point cloud frames, Point Cloud Frame Interpolation aims to generate intermediate frame(s) between them. To achieve that, we propose a novel framework, namely Point Cloud Frame Interpolation Network (PointINet). Based on the proposed method, the low frame rate point cloud streams can be upsampled to higher frame rates. We start by estimating bi-directional 3D scene flow between the two point clouds and then warp them to the given time step based on the 3D scene flow. To fuse the two warped frames and generate intermediate point cloud(s), we propose a novel learning-based points fusion module, which simultaneously takes two warped point clouds into consideration. We design both quantitative and qualitative experiments to evaluate the performance of the point cloud frame interpolation method and extensive experiments on two large scale outdoor LiDAR datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PointINet. Our code is available at https://github.com/ispc-lab/PointINet.git.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

MoNet: Motion-based Point Cloud Prediction Network

Predicting the future can significantly improve the safety of intelligent vehicles, which is a key component in autonomous driving. 3D point clouds accurately model 3D information of surrounding environment and are crucial for intelligent vehicles to perceive the scene. Therefore, prediction of 3D point clouds has great significance for intelligent vehicles, which can be utilized for numerous further applications. However, due to point clouds are unordered and unstructured, point cloud prediction is challenging and has not been deeply explored in current literature. In this paper, we propose a novel motion-based neural network named MoNet. The key idea of the proposed MoNet is to integrate motion features between two consecutive point clouds into the prediction pipeline. The introduction of motion features enables the model to more accurately capture the variations of motion information across frames and thus make better predictions for future motion. In addition, content features are introduced to model the spatial content of individual point clouds. A recurrent neural network named MotionRNN is proposed to capture the temporal correlations of both features. Besides, we propose an attention-based motion align module to address the problem of missing motion features in the inference pipeline. Extensive experiments on two large scale outdoor LiDAR datasets demonstrate the performance of the proposed MoNet. Moreover, we perform experiments on applications using the predicted point clouds and the results indicate the great application potential of the proposed method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Tau functions of the charged free bosons

We study bosonic tau functions in relation with the charged free bosonic fields. It is proved that up to a constant the only tau function in the Fock space M is the vacuum vector, and some tau functions were given in the completion of M using Schur functions. We also give a new proof of Borchardt's identity and obtain several q-series identities by using the boson-boson correspondence.

math.QA↗

arXiv2020

Correlation functions of charged free boson and fermion systems

Using the idea of the quantum inverse scattering method, we introduce the operators $\mathbf{B}(x), \mathbf{C}(x)$ and $\mathbf{\tilde{B}}(x), \mathbf{\tilde{C}}(x)$ corresponding to the off-diagonal entries of the monodromy matrix $T$ for the phase model and $i$-boson model in terms of bc fermions and neutral fermions respectively, thus giving alternative treatment of the KP and BKP hierarchies. We also introduce analogous operators $\mathbf{B}^{*}(x)$ and $\mathbf{C}^{*}(x)$ for the charged free boson system and show that they are in complete analogy to those of $bc$ fermionic fields. It is proved that the correlation function $\langle 0|\mathbf{C}(x_N)\cdots\mathbf{C}(x_1)\mathbf{B}(y_1)\cdots $ $\mathbf{B}(y_N)|0\rangle$ in the $bc$ fermionic fields is the inverse of the correlation function $\langle 0|\mathbf{C}^{*}(x_N)\cdots\mathbf{C}^{*}(x_1)\mathbf{B}^{*}(y_1)\cdots \mathbf{B}^{*}(y_N)|0\rangle$ in the charged free bosons.

math.QA↗

arXiv2019

Integration of Nonlinear Disturbance Observer within Proxy-based Sliding Mode Control for Pneumatic Muscle Actuators

This paper presents an integration of nonlinear disturbance observer within proxy-based sliding mode control (IDO-PSMC) approach for Pneumatic Muscle Actuators (PMAs). Due to the nonlinearities, uncertainties, hysteresis, and time-varying characteristics of the PMA, the model parameters are difficult to be identified accurately, which results in unmeasurable uncertainties and disturbances of the system. To solve this problem, a novel design of proxy-based sliding mode controller (PSMC) combined with a nonlinear disturbance observer (DO) is used for the tracking control of the PMA. Our approach combines both the merits of the PSMC and the DO so that it is effective in both reducing the ``chattering" phenomenon and improving the system robustness. A constrained Firefly Algorithm is used to search for the optimal control parameters. Based on the Lyapunov theorem, the states of the PMA are shown to be globally uniformly ultimately bounded. Extensive experiments were conducted to verify the superior performance of our approach, in multiple tracking scenarios.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2015

Direct Adaptive Controller for Uncertain MIMO Dynamic Systems with Time-varying Delay and Dead-zone Inputs

This paper presents an adaptive tracking control method for a class of nonlinearly parameterized MIMO dynamic systems with time-varying delay and unknown nonlinear dead-zone inputs. A new high dimensional integral Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional is introduced for the adaptive controller to guarantee global stability of the considered systems and also ensure convergence of the tracking errors to the origin. The proposed method provides an alternative to existing methods used for MIMO time-delay systems with dead-zone nonlinearities.

eess.SY↗