Models, code, and papers for "Bo Li":

##### 3D Fully Convolutional Network for Vehicle Detection in Point Cloud

Jan 16, 2017
Bo Li

2D fully convolutional network has been recently successfully applied to object detection from images. In this paper, we extend the fully convolutional network based detection techniques to 3D and apply it to point cloud data. The proposed approach is verified on the task of vehicle detection from lidar point cloud for autonomous driving. Experiments on the KITTI dataset shows a significant performance improvement over the previous point cloud based detection approaches.

##### Adversarial adaptive 1-D convolutional neural networks for bearing fault diagnosis under varying working condition

May 09, 2018
Bo Zhang, Wei Li, Jie Hao, Xiao-Li Li, Meng Zhang

Traditional intelligent fault diagnosis of rolling bearings work well only under a common assumption that the labeled training data (source domain) and unlabeled testing data (target domain) are drawn from the same distribution. However, in many real-world applications, this assumption does not hold, especially when the working condition varies. In this paper, a new adversarial adaptive 1-D CNN called A2CNN is proposed to address this problem. A2CNN consists of four parts, namely, a source feature extractor, a target feature extractor, a label classifier and a domain discriminator. The layers between the source and target feature extractor are partially untied during the training stage to take both training efficiency and domain adaptation into consideration. Experiments show that A2CNN has strong fault-discriminative and domain-invariant capacity, and therefore can achieve high accuracy under different working conditions. We also visualize the learned features and the networks to explore the reasons behind the high performance of our proposed model.

##### ChebNet: Efficient and Stable Constructions of Deep Neural Networks with Rectified Power Units using Chebyshev Approximations

Dec 20, 2019
Shanshan Tang, Bo Li, Haijun Yu

In a recent paper [B. Li, S. Tang and H. Yu, arXiv:1903.05858], it was shown that deep neural networks built with rectified power units (RePU) can give better approximation for sufficient smooth functions than those with rectified linear units, by converting polynomial approximation given in power series into deep neural networks with optimal complexity and no approximation error. However, in practice, power series are not easy to compute. In this paper, we propose a new and more stable way to construct deep RePU neural networks based on Chebyshev polynomial approximations. By using a hierarchical structure of Chebyshev polynomial approximation in frequency domain, we build efficient and stable deep neural network constructions. In theory, ChebNets and the deep RePU nets based on Power series have the same upper error bounds for general function approximations. But numerically, ChebNets are much more stable. Numerical results show that the constructed ChebNets can be further trained and obtain much better results than those obtained by training deep RePU nets constructed basing on power series.

* 18 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables
##### Large Deviation Analysis of Function Sensitivity in Random Deep Neural Networks

Oct 13, 2019

Mean field theory has been successfully used to analyze deep neural networks (DNN) in the infinite size limit. Given the finite size of realistic DNN, we utilize the large deviation theory and path integral analysis to study the deviation of functions represented by DNN from their typical mean field solutions. The parameter perturbations investigated include weight sparsification (dilution) and binarization, which are commonly used in model simplification, for both ReLU and sign activation functions. We find that random networks with ReLU activation are more robust to parameter perturbations with respect to their counterparts with sign activation, which arguably is reflected in the simplicity of the functions they generate.

##### Efficient Relative Pose Estimation for Cameras and Generalized Cameras in Case of Known Relative Rotation Angle

Jan 31, 2019
Evgeniy Martyushev, Bo Li

We propose two minimal solutions to the problem of relative pose estimation of (i) a calibrated camera from four points in two views and (ii) a calibrated generalized camera from five points in two views. In both cases, the relative rotation angle between the views is assumed to be known. In practice, such angle can be derived from the readings of a 3d gyroscope. We represent the rotation part of the motion in terms of unit quaternions in order to construct polynomial equations encoding the epipolar constraints. The Gr\"{o}bner basis technique is then used to efficiently derive the solutions. Our first solver for regular cameras significantly improves the existing state-of-the-art solution. The second solver for generalized cameras is novel. The presented minimal solvers can be used in a hypothesize-and-test architecture such as RANSAC for reliable pose estimation. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets confirm that our algorithms are numerically stable, fast and robust.

* 15 pages, 9 eps-figures
##### Exploring the Function Space of Deep-Learning Machines

Aug 09, 2018

The function space of deep-learning machines is investigated by studying growth in the entropy of functions of a given error with respect to a reference function, realized by a deep-learning machine. Using physics-inspired methods we study both sparsely and densely-connected architectures to discover a layer-wise convergence of candidate functions, marked by a corresponding reduction in entropy when approaching the reference function, gain insight into the importance of having a large number of layers, and observe phase transitions as the error increases.

* Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 248301 (2018)
* New examples of networks with ReLU activation and convolutional networks are included
##### 3D model retrieval using global and local radial distances

Jun 10, 2013
Bo Li, Henry Johan

3D model retrieval techniques can be classified as histogram-based, view-based and graph-based approaches. We propose a hybrid shape descriptor which combines the global and local radial distance features by utilizing the histogram-based and view-based approaches respectively. We define an area-weighted global radial distance with respect to the center of the bounding sphere of the model and encode its distribution into a 2D histogram as the global radial distance shape descriptor. We then uniformly divide the bounding cube of a 3D model into a set of small cubes and define their centers as local centers. Then, we compute the local radial distance of a point based on the nearest local center. By sparsely sampling a set of views and encoding the local radial distance feature on the rendered views by color coding, we extract the local radial distance shape descriptor. Based on these two shape descriptors, we develop a hybrid radial distance shape descriptor for 3D model retrieval. Experiment results show that our hybrid shape descriptor outperforms several typical histogram-based and view-based approaches.

* The International Workshop on Advanced Image Technology (IWAIT2010), 2010
* 6
##### Pairwise Teacher-Student Network for Semi-Supervised Hashing

Feb 02, 2019
Shifeng Zhang, Jianmin Li, Bo Zhang

Hashing method maps similar high-dimensional data to binary hashcodes with smaller hamming distance, and it has received broad attention due to its low storage cost and fast retrieval speed. Pairwise similarity is easily obtained and widely used for retrieval, and most supervised hashing algorithms are carefully designed for the pairwise supervisions. As labeling all data pairs is difficult, semi-supervised hashing is proposed which aims at learning efficient codes with limited labeled pairs and abundant unlabeled ones. Existing methods build graphs to capture the structure of dataset, but they are not working well for complex data as the graph is built based on the data representations and determining the representations of complex data is difficult. In this paper, we propose a novel teacher-student semi-supervised hashing framework in which the student is trained with the pairwise information produced by the teacher network. The network follows the smoothness assumption, which achieves consistent distances for similar data pairs so that the retrieval results are similar for neighborhood queries. Experiments on large-scale datasets show that the proposed method reaches impressive gain over the supervised baselines and is superior to state-of-the-art semi-supervised hashing methods.

##### Semantic Cluster Unary Loss for Efficient Deep Hashing

May 15, 2018
Shifeng Zhang, Jianmin Li, Bo Zhang

Hashing method maps similar data to binary hashcodes with smaller hamming distance, which has received a broad attention due to its low storage cost and fast retrieval speed. With the rapid development of deep learning, deep hashing methods have achieved promising results in efficient information retrieval. Most of the existing deep hashing methods adopt pairwise or triplet losses to deal with similarities underlying the data, but the training is difficult and less efficient because $O(n^2)$ data pairs and $O(n^3)$ triplets are involved. To address these issues, we propose a novel deep hashing algorithm with unary loss which can be trained very efficiently. We first of all introduce a Unary Upper Bound of the traditional triplet loss, thus reducing the complexity to $O(n)$ and bridging the classification-based unary loss and the triplet loss. Second, we propose a novel Semantic Cluster Deep Hashing (SCDH) algorithm by introducing a modified Unary Upper Bound loss, named Semantic Cluster Unary Loss (SCUL). The resultant hashcodes form several compact clusters, which means hashcodes in the same cluster have similar semantic information. We also demonstrate that the proposed SCDH is easy to be extended to semi-supervised settings by incorporating the state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning algorithms. Experiments on large-scale datasets show that the proposed method is superior to state-of-the-art hashing algorithms.

* 12 pages
##### Monocular Depth Estimation with Hierarchical Fusion of Dilated CNNs and Soft-Weighted-Sum Inference

Aug 02, 2017
Bo Li, Yuchao Dai, Mingyi He

Monocular depth estimation is a challenging task in complex compositions depicting multiple objects of diverse scales. Albeit the recent great progress thanks to the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation methods still fall short to handle such real-world challenging scenarios. In this paper, we propose a deep end-to-end learning framework to tackle these challenges, which learns the direct mapping from a color image to the corresponding depth map. First, we represent monocular depth estimation as a multi-category dense labeling task by contrast to the regression based formulation. In this way, we could build upon the recent progress in dense labeling such as semantic segmentation. Second, we fuse different side-outputs from our front-end dilated convolutional neural network in a hierarchical way to exploit the multi-scale depth cues for depth estimation, which is critical to achieve scale-aware depth estimation. Third, we propose to utilize soft-weighted-sum inference instead of the hard-max inference, transforming the discretized depth score to continuous depth value. Thus, we reduce the influence of quantization error and improve the robustness of our method. Extensive experiments on the NYU Depth V2 and KITTI datasets show the superiority of our method compared with current state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, experiments on the NYU V2 dataset reveal that our model is able to learn the probability distribution of depth.

##### Sparse Black-box Video Attack with Reinforcement Learning

Jan 11, 2020
Huanqian Yan, Xingxing Wei, Bo Li

Adversarial attacks on video recognition models have been explored recently. However, most existing works treat each video frame equally and ignore their temporal interactions. To overcome this drawback, a few methods try to select some key frames, and then perform attacks based on them. Unfortunately, their selecting strategy is independent with the attacking step, therefore the resulting performance is limited. In this paper, we aim to attack video recognition task in the black-box setting. The difference is, we think the frame selection phase is closely relevant with the attacking phase. The reasonable key frames should be adjusted according to the feedback of attacking threat models. Based on this idea, we formulate the black-box video attacks into the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework. Specifically, the environment in RL is set as the threat models, and the agent in RL plays the role of frame selecting and video attacking simultaneously. By continuously querying the threat models and receiving the feedback of predicted probabilities (reward), the agent adjusts its frame selection strategy and performs attacks (action). Step by step, the optimal key frames are selected and the smallest adversarial perturbations are achieved. We conduct a series of experiments with two mainstream video recognition models: C3D and LRCN on the public UCF-101 and HMDB-51 datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly reduce the perturbation of adversarial examples and attacking on the sparse video frames can have better attack effectiveness than attacking on each frame.

##### MG-WFBP: Merging Gradients Wisely for Efficient Communication in Distributed Deep Learning

Dec 18, 2019
Shaohuai Shi, Xiaowen Chu, Bo Li

Distributed synchronous stochastic gradient descent has been widely used to train deep neural networks (DNNs) on computer clusters. With the increase of computational power, network communications generally limit the system scalability. Wait-free backpropagation (WFBP) is a popular solution to overlap communications with computations during the training process. In this paper, we observe that many DNNs have a large number of layers with only a small amount of data to be communicated at each layer in distributed training, which could make WFBP inefficient. Based on the fact that merging some short communication tasks into a single one can reduce the overall communication time, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the training time in pipelining communications and computations. We derive an optimal solution that can be solved efficiently without affecting the training performance. We then apply the solution to propose a distributed training algorithm named merged-gradient WFBP (MG-WFBP) and implement it in two platforms Caffe and PyTorch. Extensive experiments in three GPU clusters are conducted to verify the effectiveness of MG-WFBP. We further exploit the trace-based simulation of 64 GPUs to explore the potential scaling efficiency of MG-WFBP. Experimental results show that MG-WFBP achieves much better scaling performance than existing methods.

* Under review as a journal paper. 14 pages. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1811.11141
##### PowerNet: Efficient Representations of Polynomials and Smooth Functions by Deep Neural Networks with Rectified Power Units

Sep 09, 2019
Bo Li, Shanshan Tang, Haijun Yu

Deep neural network with rectified linear units (ReLU) is getting more and more popular recently. However, the derivatives of the function represented by a ReLU network are not continuous, which limit the usage of ReLU network to situations only when smoothness is not required. In this paper, we construct deep neural networks with rectified power units (RePU), which can give better approximations for smooth functions. Optimal algorithms are proposed to explicitly build neural networks with sparsely connected RePUs, which we call PowerNets, to represent polynomials with no approximation error. For general smooth functions, we first project the function to their polynomial approximations, then use the proposed algorithms to construct corresponding PowerNets. Thus, the error of best polynomial approximation provides an upper bound of the best RePU network approximation error. For smooth functions in higher dimensional Sobolev spaces, we use fast spectral transforms for tensor-product grid and sparse grid discretization to get polynomial approximations. Our constructive algorithms show clearly a close connection between spectral methods and deep neural networks: a PowerNet with $n$ layers can exactly represent polynomials up to degree $s^n$, where $s$ is the power of RePUs. The proposed PowerNets have potential applications in the situations where high-accuracy is desired or smoothness is required.

* 22 pages, 3 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1903.05858
##### A Critical Note on the Evaluation of Clustering Algorithms

Aug 10, 2019
Li Zhong, Tiantian Zhang, Bo Yuan

Experimental evaluation is a major research methodology for investigating clustering algorithms. For this purpose, a number of benchmark datasets have been widely used in the literature and their quality plays an important role on the value of the research work. However, in most of the existing studies, little attention has been paid to the specific properties of the datasets and they are often regarded as black-box problems. In our work, with the help of advanced visualization and dimension reduction techniques, we show that there are potential issues with some of the popular benchmark datasets used to evaluate clustering algorithms that may seriously compromise the research quality and even may produce completely misleading results. We suggest that significant efforts need to be devoted to improving the current practice of experimental evaluation of clustering algorithms by having a principled analysis of each benchmark dataset of interest.

* 4 pages, 9 figures
##### Efficient Navigation of Colloidal Robots in an Unknown Environment via Deep Reinforcement Learning

Jul 31, 2019
Yuguang Yang, Michael A. Bevan, Bo Li

Equipping active colloidal robots with intelligence such that they can efficiently navigate in unknown complex environments could dramatically impact their use in emerging applications like precision surgery and targeted drug delivery. Here we develop a model-free deep reinforcement learning that can train colloidal robots to learn effective navigation strategies in unknown environments with random obstacles. We show that trained robot agents learn to make navigation decisions regarding both obstacle avoidance and travel time minimization, based solely on local sensory inputs without prior knowledge of the global environment. Such agents with biologically inspired mechanisms can acquire competitive navigation capabilities in large-scale, complex environments containing obstacles of diverse shapes, sizes, and configurations. This study illustrates the potential of artificial intelligence in engineering active colloidal systems for future applications and constructing complex active systems with visual and learning capability.

* 6 pages, 5 figures
##### Efficient Navigation of Active Particles in an Unseen Environment via Deep Reinforcement Learning

Jun 26, 2019
Yuguang Yang, Michael A. Bevan, Bo Li

Equipping active particles with intelligence such that they can efficiently navigate in an unknown complex environment is essential for emerging applications like precision surgery and targeted drug delivery. Here we develop a deep reinforcement learning algorithm that can train active particles to navigate in environments with random obstacles. Through numerical experiments, we show that the trained particle agent learns to make navigation decision regarding both obstacle avoidance and travel time minimization, relying only on local pixel-level sensory inputs but not on pre-knowledge of the entire environment. In unseen complex obstacle environments, the trained particle agent can navigate nearly optimally in arbitrarily long distance nearly optimally at a fixed computational cost. This study illustrates the potentials of employing artificial intelligence to bridge the gap between active particle engineering and emerging real-world applications.

* 14 pages, 4 figures
##### Computing Committor Functions for the Study of Rare Events Using Deep Learning

Jun 14, 2019
Qianxiao Li, Bo Lin, Weiqing Ren

The committor function is a central object of study in understanding transitions between metastable states in complex systems. However, computing the committor function for realistic systems at low temperatures is a challenging task, due to the curse of dimensionality and the scarcity of transition data. In this paper, we introduce a computational approach that overcomes these issues and achieves good performance on complex benchmark problems with rough energy landscapes. The new approach combines deep learning, data sampling and feature engineering techniques. This establishes an alternative practical method for studying rare transition events between metastable states in complex, high dimensional systems.

##### Adaptive Wing Loss for Robust Face Alignment via Heatmap Regression

Apr 16, 2019
Xinyao Wang, Liefeng Bo, Li Fuxin

Heatmap regression has became one of the mainstream approaches to localize facial landmarks. As Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) are becoming popular in solving computer vision tasks, extensive research has been done on these architectures. However, the loss function for heatmap regression is rarely studied. In this paper, we analyze the ideal loss function properties for heatmap regression in face alignment problems. Then we propose a novel loss function, named Adaptive Wing loss, that is able to adapt its shape to different types of ground truth heatmap pixels. This adaptability decreases the loss to zero on foreground pixels while leaving some loss on background pixels. To address the imbalance between foreground and background pixels, we also propose Weighted Loss Map, which assigns high weights on foreground and difficult background pixels to help training process focus more on pixels that are crucial to landmark localization. To further improve face alignment accuracy, we introduce boundary prediction and CoordConv with boundary coordinates. Extensive experiments on different benchmarks, including COFW, 300W and WFLW, show our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by a significant margin on various evaluation metrics. Besides, the Adaptive Wing loss also helps other heatmap regression tasks. Code will be made publicly available.

##### Combinatorial Sleeping Bandits with Fairness Constraints

Jan 18, 2019
Fengjiao Li, Jia Liu, Bo Ji

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) model has been widely adopted for studying many practical optimization problems (network resource allocation, ad placement, crowdsourcing, etc.) with unknown parameters. The goal of the player here is to maximize the cumulative reward in the face of uncertainty. However, the basic MAB model neglects several important factors of the system in many real-world applications, where multiple arms can be simultaneously played and an arm could sometimes be "sleeping". Besides, ensuring fairness is also a key design concern in practice. To that end, we propose a new Combinatorial Sleeping MAB model with Fairness constraints, called CSMAB-F, aiming to address the aforementioned crucial modeling issues. The objective is now to maximize the reward while satisfying the fairness requirement of a minimum selection fraction for each individual arm. To tackle this new problem, we extend an online learning algorithm, UCB, to deal with a critical tradeoff between exploitation and exploration and employ the virtual queue technique to properly handle the fairness constraints. By carefully integrating these two techniques, we develop a new algorithm, called Learning with Fairness Guarantee (LFG), for the CSMAB-F problem. Further, we rigorously prove that not only LFG is feasibility-optimal, but it also has a time-average regret upper bounded by $\frac{N}{2\eta}+\frac{\beta_1\sqrt{mNT\log{T}}+\beta_2 N}{T}$, where N is the total number of arms, m is the maximum number of arms that can be simultaneously played, T is the time horizon, $\beta_1$ and $\beta_2$ are constants, and $\eta$ is a design parameter that we can tune. Finally, we perform extensive simulations to corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Interestingly, the simulation results reveal an important tradeoff between the regret and the speed of convergence to a point satisfying the fairness constraints.

* 13 pages, 9 figures