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Add to EdgeThe RoboDrive Challenge: Drive Anytime Anywhere in Any Condition
May 14, 2024
In the realm of autonomous driving, robust perception under out-of-distribution conditions is paramount for the safe deployment of vehicles. Challenges such as adverse weather, sensor malfunctions, and environmental unpredictability can severely impact the performance of autonomous systems. The 2024 RoboDrive Challenge was crafted to propel the development of driving perception technologies that can withstand and adapt to these real-world variabilities. Focusing on four pivotal tasks -- BEV detection, map segmentation, semantic occupancy prediction, and multi-view depth estimation -- the competition laid down a gauntlet to innovate and enhance system resilience against typical and atypical disturbances. This year's challenge consisted of five distinct tracks and attracted 140 registered teams from 93 institutes across 11 countries, resulting in nearly one thousand submissions evaluated through our servers. The competition culminated in 15 top-performing solutions, which introduced a range of innovative approaches including advanced data augmentation, multi-sensor fusion, self-supervised learning for error correction, and new algorithmic strategies to enhance sensor robustness. These contributions significantly advanced the state of the art, particularly in handling sensor inconsistencies and environmental variability. Participants, through collaborative efforts, pushed the boundaries of current technologies, showcasing their potential in real-world scenarios. Extensive evaluations and analyses provided insights into the effectiveness of these solutions, highlighting key trends and successful strategies for improving the resilience of driving perception systems. This challenge has set a new benchmark in the field, providing a rich repository of techniques expected to guide future research in this field.
An Empirical Study of Parameter Efficient Fine-tuning on Vision-Language Pre-train Model
Mar 13, 2024
Recent studies applied Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning techniques (PEFTs) to efficiently narrow the performance gap between pre-training and downstream. There are two important factors for various PEFTs, namely, the accessible data size and fine-tunable parameter size. A natural expectation for PEFTs is that the performance of various PEFTs is positively related to the data size and fine-tunable parameter size. However, according to the evaluation of five PEFTs on two downstream vision-language (VL) tasks, we find that such an intuition holds only if the downstream data and task are not consistent with pre-training. For downstream fine-tuning consistent with pre-training, data size no longer affects the performance, while the influence of fine-tunable parameter size is not monotonous. We believe such an observation could guide the choice of training strategy for various PEFTs.
Prognostic Covariate Adjustment for Logistic Regression in Randomized Controlled Trials
Feb 29, 2024Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with binary primary endpoints introduce novel challenges for inferring the causal effects of treatments. The most significant challenge is non-collapsibility, in which the conditional odds ratio estimand under covariate adjustment differs from the unconditional estimand in the logistic regression analysis of RCT data. This issue gives rise to apparent paradoxes, such as the variance of the estimator for the conditional odds ratio from a covariate-adjusted model being greater than the variance of the estimator from the unadjusted model. We address this challenge in the context of adjustment based on predictions of control outcomes from generative artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, which are referred to as prognostic scores. We demonstrate that prognostic score adjustment in logistic regression increases the power of the Wald test for the conditional odds ratio under a fixed sample size, or alternatively reduces the necessary sample size to achieve a desired power, compared to the unadjusted analysis. We derive formulae for prospective calculations of the power gain and sample size reduction that can result from adjustment for the prognostic score. Furthermore, we utilize g-computation to expand the scope of prognostic score adjustment to inferences on the marginal risk difference, relative risk, and odds ratio estimands. We demonstrate the validity of our formulae via extensive simulation studies that encompass different types of logistic regression model specifications. Our simulation studies also indicate how prognostic score adjustment can reduce the variance of g-computation estimators for the marginal estimands while maintaining frequentist properties such as asymptotic unbiasedness and Type I error rate control. Our methodology can ultimately enable more definitive and conclusive analyses for RCTs with binary primary endpoints.
Achieving Near-Optimal Regret for Bandit Algorithms with Uniform Last-Iterate Guarantee
Feb 20, 2024Existing performance measures for bandit algorithms such as regret, PAC bounds, or uniform-PAC (Dann et al., 2017), typically evaluate the cumulative performance, while allowing the play of an arbitrarily bad arm at any finite time t. Such a behavior can be highly detrimental in high-stakes applications. This paper introduces a stronger performance measure, the uniform last-iterate (ULI) guarantee, capturing both cumulative and instantaneous performance of bandit algorithms. Specifically, ULI characterizes the instantaneous performance since it ensures that the per-round regret of the played arm is bounded by a function, monotonically decreasing w.r.t. (large) round t, preventing revisits to bad arms when sufficient samples are available. We demonstrate that a near-optimal ULI guarantee directly implies near-optimal cumulative performance across aforementioned performance measures. To examine the achievability of ULI in the finite arm setting, we first provide two positive results that some elimination-based algorithms and high-probability adversarial algorithms with stronger analysis or additional designs, can attain near-optimal ULI guarantees. Then, we also provide a negative result, indicating that optimistic algorithms cannot achieve a near-optimal ULI guarantee. Finally, we propose an efficient algorithm for linear bandits with infinitely many arms, which achieves the ULI guarantee, given access to an optimization oracle.
Image Clustering with External Guidance
Oct 18, 2023
The core of clustering is incorporating prior knowledge to construct supervision signals. From classic k-means based on data compactness to recent contrastive clustering guided by self-supervision, the evolution of clustering methods intrinsically corresponds to the progression of supervision signals. At present, substantial efforts have been devoted to mining internal supervision signals from data. Nevertheless, the abundant external knowledge such as semantic descriptions, which naturally conduces to clustering, is regrettably overlooked. In this work, we propose leveraging external knowledge as a new supervision signal to guide clustering, even though it seems irrelevant to the given data. To implement and validate our idea, we design an externally guided clustering method (Text-Aided Clustering, TAC), which leverages the textual semantics of WordNet to facilitate image clustering. Specifically, TAC first selects and retrieves WordNet nouns that best distinguish images to enhance the feature discriminability. Then, to improve image clustering performance, TAC collaborates text and image modalities by mutually distilling cross-modal neighborhood information. Experiments demonstrate that TAC achieves state-of-the-art performance on five widely used and three more challenging image clustering benchmarks, including the full ImageNet-1K dataset.
Automated Assessment of Critical View of Safety in Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy
Sep 13, 2023
Cholecystectomy (gallbladder removal) is one of the most common procedures in the US, with more than 1.2M procedures annually. Compared with classical open cholecystectomy, laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) is associated with significantly shorter recovery period, and hence is the preferred method. However, LC is also associated with an increase in bile duct injuries (BDIs), resulting in significant morbidity and mortality. The primary cause of BDIs from LCs is misidentification of the cystic duct with the bile duct. Critical view of safety (CVS) is the most effective of safety protocols, which is said to be achieved during the surgery if certain criteria are met. However, due to suboptimal understanding and implementation of CVS, the BDI rates have remained stable over the last three decades. In this paper, we develop deep-learning techniques to automate the assessment of CVS in LCs. An innovative aspect of our research is on developing specialized learning techniques by incorporating domain knowledge to compensate for the limited training data available in practice. In particular, our CVS assessment process involves a fusion of two segmentation maps followed by an estimation of a certain region of interest based on anatomical structures close to the gallbladder, and then finally determination of each of the three CVS criteria via rule-based assessment of structural information. We achieved a gain of over 11.8% in mIoU on relevant classes with our two-stream semantic segmentation approach when compared to a single-model baseline, and 1.84% in mIoU with our proposed Sobel loss function when compared to a Transformer-based baseline model. For CVS criteria, we achieved up to 16% improvement and, for the overall CVS assessment, we achieved 5% improvement in balanced accuracy compared to DeepCVS under the same experiment settings.
Least Square Value Iteration is Robust Under Locally Bounded Misspecification Error
Jun 19, 2023
The success of reinforcement learning heavily relies on the function approximation of policy, value or models, where misspecification (a mismatch between the ground-truth and best function approximators) naturally occurs especially when the ground-truth is complex. As misspecification error does not vanish even with infinite number of samples, designing algorithms that are robust under misspecification is of paramount importance. Recently, it is shown that policy-based approaches can be robust even when the policy function approximation is under a large locally-bounded misspecification error, with which the function class may have $\Omega(1)$ approximation error in certain states and actions but is only small on average under a policy-induced state-distribution; whereas it is only known that value-based approach can effectively learn under globally-bounded misspecification error, i.e., the approximation errors to value functions have a uniform upper bound on all state-actions. Yet it remains an open question whether similar robustness can be achieved with value-based approaches. In this paper, we answer this question affirmatively by showing that the algorithm, Least-Square-Value-Iteration [Jin et al, 2020], with carefully designed exploration bonus can achieve robustness under local misspecification error bound. In particular, we show that algorithm achieves a regret bound of $\widetilde{O}\left(\sqrt{d^3KH^4} + dKH^2\zeta \right)$, where $d$ is the dimension of linear features, $H$ is the length of the episode, $K$ is the total number of episodes, and $\zeta$ is the local bound of the misspecification error. Moreover, we show that the algorithm can achieve the same regret bound without knowing $\zeta$ and can be used as robust policy evaluation oracle that can be applied to improve sample complexity in policy-based approaches.
Low-Switching Policy Gradient with Exploration via Online Sensitivity Sampling
Jun 15, 2023
Policy optimization methods are powerful algorithms in Reinforcement Learning (RL) for their flexibility to deal with policy parameterization and ability to handle model misspecification. However, these methods usually suffer from slow convergence rates and poor sample complexity. Hence it is important to design provably sample efficient algorithms for policy optimization. Yet, recent advances for this problems have only been successful in tabular and linear setting, whose benign structures cannot be generalized to non-linearly parameterized policies. In this paper, we address this problem by leveraging recent advances in value-based algorithms, including bounded eluder-dimension and online sensitivity sampling, to design a low-switching sample-efficient policy optimization algorithm, LPO, with general non-linear function approximation. We show that, our algorithm obtains an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy with only $\widetilde{O}(\frac{\text{poly}(d)}{\varepsilon^3})$ samples, where $\varepsilon$ is the suboptimality gap and $d$ is a complexity measure of the function class approximating the policy. This drastically improves previously best-known sample bound for policy optimization algorithms, $\widetilde{O}(\frac{\text{poly}(d)}{\varepsilon^8})$. Moreover, we empirically test our theory with deep neural nets to show the benefits of the theoretical inspiration.
Incomplete Multi-view Clustering via Prototype-based Imputation
Jan 30, 2023
In this paper, we study how to achieve two characteristics highly-expected by incomplete multi-view clustering (IMvC). Namely, i) instance commonality refers to that within-cluster instances should share a common pattern, and ii) view versatility refers to that cross-view samples should own view-specific patterns. To this end, we design a novel dual-stream model which employs a dual attention layer and a dual contrastive learning loss to learn view-specific prototypes and model the sample-prototype relationship. When the view is missed, our model performs data recovery using the prototypes in the missing view and the sample-prototype relationship inherited from the observed view. Thanks to our dual-stream model, both cluster- and view-specific information could be captured, and thus the instance commonality and view versatility could be preserved to facilitate IMvC. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method on six challenging benchmarks compared with 11 approaches. The code will be released.
Deep Fair Clustering via Maximizing and Minimizing Mutual Information
Sep 26, 2022
Fair clustering aims to divide data into distinct clusters, while preventing sensitive attributes (e.g., gender, race, RNA sequencing technique) from dominating the clustering. Although a number of works have been conducted and achieved huge success in recent, most of them are heuristical, and there lacks a unified theory for algorithm design. In this work, we fill this blank by developing a mutual information theory for deep fair clustering and accordingly designing a novel algorithm, dubbed FCMI. In brief, through maximizing and minimizing mutual information, FCMI is designed to achieve four characteristics highly expected by deep fair clustering, i.e., compact, balanced, and fair clusters, as well as informative features. Besides the contributions to theory and algorithm, another contribution of this work is proposing a novel fair clustering metric built upon information theory as well. Unlike existing evaluation metrics, our metric measures the clustering quality and fairness in a whole instead of separate manner. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed FCMI, we carry out experiments on six benchmarks including a single-cell RNA-seq atlas compared with 11 state-of-the-art methods in terms of five metrics. Code will be released after the acceptance.