Jiacong Xu

Jiacong Xu, Yi Zhang, Jiawei Peng et al.

Accurately estimating the 3D pose and shape is an essential step towards understanding animal behavior, and can potentially benefit many downstream applications, such as wildlife conservation. However, research in this area is held back by the lack of a comprehensive and diverse dataset with high-quality 3D pose and shape annotations. In this paper, we propose Animal3D, the first comprehensive dataset for mammal animal 3D pose and shape estimation. Animal3D consists of 3379 images collected from 40 mammal species, high-quality annotations of 26 keypoints, and importantly the pose and shape parameters of the SMAL model. All annotations were labeled and checked manually in a multi-stage process to ensure highest quality results. Based on the Animal3D dataset, we benchmark representative shape and pose estimation models at: (1) supervised learning from only the Animal3D data, (2) synthetic to real transfer from synthetically generated images, and (3) fine-tuning human pose and shape estimation models. Our experimental results demonstrate that predicting the 3D shape and pose of animals across species remains a very challenging task, despite significant advances in human pose estimation. Our results further demonstrate that synthetic pre-training is a viable strategy to boost the model performance. Overall, Animal3D opens new directions for facilitating future research in animal 3D pose and shape estimation, and is publicly available.

Jiacong Xu, Zixiang Xiong, Shankar P. Bhattacharyya

Two-branch network architecture has shown its efficiency and effectiveness in real-time semantic segmentation tasks. However, direct fusion of high-resolution details and low-frequency context has the drawback of detailed features being easily overwhelmed by surrounding contextual information. This overshoot phenomenon limits the improvement of the segmentation accuracy of existing two-branch models. In this paper, we make a connection between Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers and reveal that a two-branch network is equivalent to a Proportional-Integral (PI) controller, which inherently suffers from similar overshoot issues. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel three-branch network architecture: PIDNet, which contains three branches to parse detailed, context and boundary information, respectively, and employs boundary attention to guide the fusion of detailed and context branches. Our family of PIDNets achieve the best trade-off between inference speed and accuracy and their accuracy surpasses all the existing models with similar inference speed on the Cityscapes and CamVid datasets. Specifically, PIDNet-S achieves 78.6% mIOU with inference speed of 93.2 FPS on Cityscapes and 80.1% mIOU with speed of 153.7 FPS on CamVid.

Jiacong Xu, Riley Kilfoyle, Zixiang Xiong et al.

Machine learning (ML) applications to time series energy utilization forecasting problems are a challenging assignment due to a variety of factors. Chief among these is the non-homogeneity of the energy utilization datasets and the geographical dispersion of energy consumers. Furthermore, these ML models require vast amounts of training data and communications overhead in order to develop an effective model. In this paper, we propose a communication-efficient time series forecasting model combining the most recent advancements in transformer architectures implemented across a geographically dispersed series of EV charging stations and an efficient variant of federated learning (FL) to enable distributed training. The time series prediction performance and communication overhead cost of our FL are compared against their counterpart models and shown to have parity in performance while consuming significantly lower data rates during training. Additionally, the comparison is made across EV charging as well as other time series datasets to demonstrate the flexibility of our proposed model in generalized time series prediction beyond energy demand. The source code for this work is available at https://github.com/XuJiacong/LoGTST_PSGF