Xinyi Yu

Bing Liu, Shunping Wang, Yufan Zhu et al.

This paper presents a survey and taxonomy of LLM fingerprinting and watermarking for identity, ownership verification, provenance, and generated-content attribution. Large language models (LLMs) require substantial investments in data, computation, and expertise, and are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, making it critical to protect LLM-related assets and trace their origins. Existing work has rapidly expanded across dataset provenance, model ownership, and generated-content detection, but the field remains fragmented: fingerprinting and watermarking are often used inconsistently, and methods are typically studied within isolated asset-specific settings. To address this gap, we introduce implicit identity as a unifying abstraction for verifiable but not directly observable identity signals in LLM systems. We distinguish fingerprinting as non-intrusive identity derived from intrinsic characteristics, and watermarking as intrusive identity deliberately embedded into data, models, or generated content. We then propose a lifecycle-based taxonomy that organises techniques across datasets, models, and generated content, and further separates them by verification semantics: similarity-based attribution and keyed verification. Finally, we establish an evaluation framework centred on identifiability, robustness, and deployability, summarising representative metrics under realistic access and transformation regimes. By unifying terminology, lifecycle stages, and evaluation objectives, this survey provides a structured foundation for studying LLM identity technologies and for developing more reliable mechanisms for asset protection and provenance.

Jintao Rong, Hao Chen, Linlin Ou et al. · cmu

The Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model has been widely used in various downstream vision tasks. The few-shot learning paradigm has been widely adopted to augment its capacity for these tasks. However, current paradigms may struggle with fine-grained classification, such as satellite image recognition, due to widening domain gaps. To address this limitation, we propose retrieval-enhanced visual prompt learning (RePrompt), which introduces retrieval mechanisms to cache and reuse the knowledge of downstream tasks. RePrompt constructs a retrieval database from either training examples or external data if available, and uses a retrieval mechanism to enhance multiple stages of a simple prompt learning baseline, thus narrowing the domain gap. During inference, our enhanced model can reference similar samples brought by retrieval to make more accurate predictions. A detailed analysis reveals that retrieval helps to improve the distribution of late features, thus, improving generalization for downstream tasks. Reprompt attains state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of vision datasets, including 11 image datasets, 3 video datasets, 1 multi-view dataset, and 4 domain generalization benchmarks.

Xinyi Yu, Guanbin Li, Wei Lou et al.

Nuclei segmentation is a fundamental but challenging task in the quantitative analysis of histopathology images. Although fully-supervised deep learning-based methods have made significant progress, a large number of labeled images are required to achieve great segmentation performance. Considering that manually labeling all nuclei instances for a dataset is inefficient, obtaining a large-scale human-annotated dataset is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Therefore, augmenting a dataset with only a few labeled images to improve the segmentation performance is of significant research and application value. In this paper, we introduce the first diffusion-based augmentation method for nuclei segmentation. The idea is to synthesize a large number of labeled images to facilitate training the segmentation model. To achieve this, we propose a two-step strategy. In the first step, we train an unconditional diffusion model to synthesize the Nuclei Structure that is defined as the representation of pixel-level semantic and distance transform. Each synthetic nuclei structure will serve as a constraint on histopathology image synthesis and is further post-processed to be an instance map. In the second step, we train a conditioned diffusion model to synthesize histopathology images based on nuclei structures. The synthetic histopathology images paired with synthetic instance maps will be added to the real dataset for training the segmentation model. The experimental results show that by augmenting 10% labeled real dataset with synthetic samples, one can achieve comparable segmentation results with the fully-supervised baseline. The code is released in: https://github.com/lhaof/Nudiff

Mingyang Zhang, Xinyi Yu, Haodong Zhao et al.

One-shot Neural architecture search (One-shot NAS) has been proposed as a time-efficient approach to obtain optimal subnet architectures and weights under different complexity cases by training only once. However, the subnet performance obtained by weight sharing is often inferior to the performance achieved by retraining. In this paper, we investigate the performance gap and attribute it to the use of uniform sampling, which is a common approach in supernet training. Uniform sampling concentrates training resources on subnets with intermediate computational resources, which are sampled with high probability. However, subnets with different complexity regions require different optimal training strategies for optimal performance. To address the problem of uniform sampling, we propose ShiftNAS, a method that can adjust the sampling probability based on the complexity of subnets. We achieve this by evaluating the performance variation of subnets with different complexity and designing an architecture generator that can accurately and efficiently provide subnets with the desired complexity. Both the sampling probability and the architecture generator can be trained end-to-end in a gradient-based manner. With ShiftNAS, we can directly obtain the optimal model architecture and parameters for a given computational complexity. We evaluate our approach on multiple visual network models, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs), and demonstrate that ShiftNAS is model-agnostic. Experimental results on ImageNet show that ShiftNAS can improve the performance of one-shot NAS without additional consumption. Source codes are available at https://github.com/bestfleer/ShiftNAS.

Wei Lou, Xinyi Yu, Chenyu Liu et al.

Cell segmentation for multi-modal microscopy images remains a challenge due to the complex textures, patterns, and cell shapes in these images. To tackle the problem, we first develop an automatic cell classification pipeline to label the microscopy images based on their low-level image characteristics, and then train a classification model based on the category labels. Afterward, we train a separate segmentation model for each category using the images in the corresponding category. Besides, we further deploy two types of segmentation models to segment cells with roundish and irregular shapes respectively. Moreover, an efficient and powerful backbone model is utilized to enhance the efficiency of our segmentation model. Evaluated on the Tuning Set of NeurIPS 2022 Cell Segmentation Challenge, our method achieves an F1-score of 0.8795 and the running time for all cases is within the time tolerance.

Michael Gleicher, Xinyi Yu, Yuheng Chen

Classification methods for binary (yes/no) tasks often produce a continuously valued score. Machine learning practitioners must perform model selection, calibration, discretization, performance assessment, tuning, and fairness assessment. Such tasks involve examining classifier results, typically using summary statistics and manual examination of details. In this paper, we provide an interactive visualization approach to support such continuously-valued classifier examination tasks. Our approach addresses the three phases of these tasks: calibration, operating point selection, and examination. We enhance standard views and introduce task-specific views so that they can be integrated into a multi-view coordination (MVC) system. We build on an existing comparison-based approach, extending it to continuous classifiers by treating the continuous values as trinary (positive, unsure, negative) even if the classifier will not ultimately use the 3-way classification. We provide use cases that demonstrate how our approach enables machine learning practitioners to accomplish key tasks.

Xinyi Yu, Liqin Lu, Jintao Rong et al.

3D scene reconstruction from 2D images has been a long-standing task. Instead of estimating per-frame depth maps and fusing them in 3D, recent research leverages the neural implicit surface as a unified representation for 3D reconstruction. Equipped with data-driven pre-trained geometric cues, these methods have demonstrated promising performance. However, inaccurate prior estimation, which is usually inevitable, can lead to suboptimal reconstruction quality, particularly in some geometrically complex regions. In this paper, we propose a two-stage training process, decouple view-dependent and view-independent colors, and leverage two novel consistency constraints to enhance detail reconstruction performance without requiring extra priors. Additionally, we introduce an essential mask scheme to adaptively influence the selection of supervision constraints, thereby improving performance in a self-supervised paradigm. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show the capability of reducing the interference from prior estimation errors and achieving high-quality scene reconstruction with rich geometric details.

Xinyi Yu, Xiaowei Wang, Jintao Rong et al.

Structural re-parameterization (Rep) methods has achieved significant performance improvement on traditional convolutional network. Most current Rep methods rely on prior knowledge to select the reparameterization operations. However, the performance of architecture is limited by the type of operations and prior knowledge. To break this restriction, in this work, an improved re-parameterization search space is designed, which including more type of re-parameterization operations. Concretely, the performance of convolutional networks can be further improved by the search space. To effectively explore this search space, an automatic re-parameterization enhancement strategy is designed based on neural architecture search (NAS), which can search a excellent re-parameterization architecture. Besides, we visualize the output features of the architecture to analyze the reasons for the formation of the re-parameterization architecture. On public datasets, we achieve better results. Under the same training conditions as ResNet, we improve the accuracy of ResNet-50 by 1.82% on ImageNet-1k.

Yang Yang, Weijie Ma, Hao Chen et al.

The combination of LiDAR and camera modalities is proven to be necessary and typical for 3D object detection according to recent studies. Existing fusion strategies tend to overly rely on the LiDAR modal in essence, which exploits the abundant semantics from the camera sensor insufficiently. However, existing methods cannot rely on information from other modalities because the corruption of LiDAR features results in a large domain gap. Following this, we propose CrossFusion, a more robust and noise-resistant scheme that makes full use of the camera and LiDAR features with the designed cross-modal complementation strategy. Extensive experiments we conducted show that our method not only outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under the setting without introducing an extra depth estimation network but also demonstrates our model's noise resistance without re-training for the specific malfunction scenarios by increasing 5.2\% mAP and 2.4\% NDS.

Xinyi Yu, Jianan Hu, Yuehai Fan et al.

Robot navigation in dynamic environments shared with humans is an important but challenging task, which suffers from performance deterioration as the crowd grows. In this paper, multi-subgoal robot navigation approach based on deep reinforcement learning is proposed, which can reason about more comprehensive relationships among all agents (robot and humans). Specifically, the next position point is planned for the robot by introducing history information and interactions in our work. Firstly, based on subgraph network, the history information of all agents is aggregated before encoding interactions through a graph neural network, so as to improve the ability of the robot to anticipate the future scenarios implicitly. Further consideration, in order to reduce the probability of unreliable next position points, the selection module is designed after policy network in the reinforcement learning framework. In addition, the next position point generated from the selection module satisfied the task requirements better than that obtained directly from the policy network. The experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both success rate and collision rate, especially in crowded human environments.

Xinyi Yu, Jiangping Lu, Xinyi Yu et al.

Oriented bounding box regression is crucial for oriented object detection. However, regression-based methods often suffer from boundary problems and the inconsistency between loss and evaluation metrics. In this paper, a modulated Kalman IoU loss of approximate SkewIoU is proposed, named MKIoU. To avoid boundary problems, we convert the oriented bounding box to Gaussian distribution, then use the Kalman filter to approximate the intersection area. However, there exists significant difference between the calculated and actual intersection areas. Thus, we propose a modulation factor to adjust the sensitivity of angle deviation and width-height offset to loss variation, making the loss more consistent with the evaluation metric. Furthermore, the Gaussian modeling method avoids the boundary problem but causes the angle confusion of square objects simultaneously. Thus, the Gaussian Angle Loss (GA Loss) is presented to solve this problem by adding a corrected loss for square targets. The proposed GA Loss can be easily extended to other Gaussian-based methods. Experiments on three publicly available aerial image datasets, DOTA, UCAS-AOD, and HRSC2016, show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Wancai Zheng, Hao Chen, Xianlong Lu et al.

Object navigation is a core capability of embodied intelligence, enabling an agent to locate target objects in unknown environments. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have facilitated zero-shot object navigation (ZSON). However, existing methods often rely on scene abstractions that convert environments into semantic maps or textual representations, causing high-level decision making to be constrained by the accuracy of low-level perception. In this work, we present 3DGSNav, a novel ZSON framework that embeds 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) as persistent memory for VLMs to enhance spatial reasoning. Through active perception, 3DGSNav incrementally constructs a 3DGS representation of the environment, enabling trajectory-guided free-viewpoint rendering of frontier-aware first-person views. Moreover, we design structured visual prompts and integrate them with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to further improve VLM reasoning. During navigation, a real-time object detector filters potential targets, while VLM-driven active viewpoint switching performs target re-verification, ensuring efficient and reliable recognition. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks and real-world experiments on a quadruped robot demonstrate that our method achieves robust and competitive performance against state-of-the-art approaches.The Project Page:https://aczheng-cai.github.io/3dgsnav.github.io/

Yuzhe Weng, Haotian Wang, Xinyi Yu et al.

Audio-driven human video generation has achieved remarkable success in monologue scenarios, largely driven by advancements in powerful video generation foundation models. Moving beyond monologues, authentic human communication is inherently a full-duplex interactive process, requiring virtual agents not only to articulate their own speech but also to react naturally to incoming conversational audio. Most existing methods simply extend conventional audio-driven paradigms to listening scenarios. However, relying on strict frame-to-frame alignment renders the model's response to long-range conversational dynamics rigid, whereas directly introducing global attention catastrophically degrades lip synchronization. Recognizing the unique temporal Scale Discrepancy between talking and listening behaviors, we introduce a multi-head Gaussian kernel to explicitly inject this physical intuition into the model as a progressive temporal inductive bias. Building upon this, we construct a full-duplex interactive virtual agent capable of simultaneously processing dual-stream audio inputs for both talking and listening. Furthermore, we introduce a rigorously cleaned Talking-Listening dataset VoxHear featuring perfectly decoupled speech and background audio tracks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach successfully fuses strong temporal alignment with deep contextual semantics, setting a new state-of-the-art for generating highly natural and responsive full-duplex interactive digital humans. The project page is available at https://warmcongee.github.io/beyond-monologue/ .

Mingyang Zhang, Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as LLaMA and T5, have shown exceptional performance across various tasks through fine-tuning. Although low-rank adaption (LoRA) has emerged to cheaply fine-tune these LLMs on downstream tasks, their deployment is still hindered by the vast model scale and computational costs. Post-training model pruning offers a way to compress LLMs. However, the current pruning methods designed for LLMs are not compatible with LoRA. This is due to their utilization of unstructured pruning on LLMs, impeding the merging of LoRA weights, or their dependence on the gradients of pre-trained weights to guide pruning, which can impose significant memory overhead. To this end, we propose LoRAPrune, a new framework that delivers an accurate structured pruned model in a highly memory-efficient manner. Specifically, we first design a LoRA-guided pruning criterion, which uses the weights and gradients of LoRA, rather than the gradients of pre-trained weights for importance estimation. We subsequently integrate this criterion into an iterative pruning process, effectively removing redundant channels and heads. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our LoRAPrune over existing approaches on the LLaMA series models. At a 50\% compression rate, LoRAPrune demonstrates superior performance over LLM-Pruner, achieving a reduction in perplexity by 4.81 on WikiText2 and 3.46 on PTB, while also decreasing memory usage by 52.6%. Besides, LoRAPrune also matches semi-structural pruning across multiple LLMs, proving its wide applicability. The code is available at https://github.com/aim-uofa/LoRAPrune.

Yiqi Zhao, Xinyi Yu, Matteo Sesia et al.

We propose conformal predictive programming (CPP), a framework to solve chance constrained optimization problems, i.e., optimization problems with constraints that are functions of random variables. CPP utilizes samples from these random variables along with the quantile lemma - central to conformal prediction - to transform the chance constrained optimization problem into a deterministic problem with a quantile reformulation. CPP inherits a priori guarantees on constraint satisfaction from existing sample average approximation approaches for a class of chance constrained optimization problems, and it provides a posteriori guarantees that are of conditional and marginal nature otherwise. The strength of CPP is that it can easily support different variants of conformal prediction which have been (or will be) proposed within the conformal prediction community. To illustrate this, we present robust CPP to deal with distribution shifts in the random variables and Mondrian CPP to deal with class conditional chance constraints. To enable tractable solutions to the quantile reformulation, we present a mixed integer programming method (CPP-MIP) encoding, a bilevel optimization strategy (CPP-Bilevel), and a sampling-and-discarding optimization strategy (CPP-Discarding). We also extend CPP to deal with joint chance constrained optimization (JCCO). In a series of case studies, we show the validity of the aforementioned approaches, empirically compare CPP-MIP, CPP-Bilevel, as well as CPP-Discarding, and illustrate the advantage of CPP as compared to scenario approach.

Mingyang Zhang, Jing Liu, Ganggui Ding et al.

Lately, the practice of utilizing task-specific fine-tuning has been implemented to improve the performance of large language models (LLM) in subsequent tasks. Through the integration of diverse LLMs, the overall competency of LLMs is significantly boosted. Nevertheless, traditional ensemble methods are notably memory-intensive, necessitating the simultaneous loading of all specialized models into GPU memory. To address the inefficiency, model merging strategies have emerged, merging all LLMs into one model to reduce the memory footprint during inference. Despite these advances, model merging often leads to parameter conflicts and performance decline as the number of experts increases. Previous methods to mitigate these conflicts include post-pruning and partial merging. However, both approaches have limitations, particularly in terms of performance and storage efficiency when merged experts increase. To address these challenges, we introduce Channel Merging, a novel strategy designed to minimize parameter conflicts while enhancing storage efficiency. This method clusters and merges channel parameters based on their similarity to form several groups offline. By ensuring that only highly similar parameters are merged within each group, it significantly reduces parameter conflicts. During inference, we can instantly look up the expert parameters from the merged groups, preserving specialized knowledge. Our experiments demonstrate that Channel Merging consistently delivers high performance, matching unmerged models in tasks like English and Chinese reasoning, mathematical reasoning, and code generation. Moreover, it obtains results comparable to model ensemble with just 53% parameters when used with a task-specific router.

Kaijun Wang, Liqin Lu, Mingyu Liu et al.

Language-guided long-horizon mobile manipulation has long been a grand challenge in embodied semantic reasoning, generalizable manipulation, and adaptive locomotion. Three fundamental limitations hinder progress: First, although large language models have improved spatial reasoning and task planning through semantic priors, existing implementations remain confined to tabletop scenarios, failing to address the constrained perception and limited actuation ranges of mobile platforms. Second, current manipulation strategies exhibit insufficient generalization when confronted with the diverse object configurations encountered in open-world environments. Third, while crucial for practical deployment, the dual requirement of maintaining high platform maneuverability alongside precise end-effector control in unstructured settings remains understudied. In this work, we present ODYSSEY, a unified mobile manipulation framework for agile quadruped robots equipped with manipulators, which seamlessly integrates high-level task planning with low-level whole-body control. To address the challenge of egocentric perception in language-conditioned tasks, we introduce a hierarchical planner powered by a vision-language model, enabling long-horizon instruction decomposition and precise action execution. At the control level, our novel whole-body policy achieves robust coordination across challenging terrains. We further present the first benchmark for long-horizon mobile manipulation, evaluating diverse indoor and outdoor scenarios. Through successful sim-to-real transfer, we demonstrate the system's generalization and robustness in real-world deployments, underscoring the practicality of legged manipulators in unstructured environments. Our work advances the feasibility of generalized robotic assistants capable of complex, dynamic tasks. Our project page: https://kaijwang.github.io/odyssey.github.io/

Xinyi Yu, Ling Yan, Pengtao Jiang et al.

The realm of Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation (WSIS) under box supervision has garnered substantial attention, showcasing remarkable advancements in recent years. However, the limitations of box supervision become apparent in its inability to furnish effective information for distinguishing foreground from background within the specified target box. This research addresses this challenge by introducing pseudo-depth maps into the training process of the instance segmentation network, thereby boosting its performance by capturing depth differences between instances. These pseudo-depth maps are generated using a readily available depth predictor and are not necessary during the inference stage. To enable the network to discern depth features when predicting masks, we integrate a depth prediction layer into the mask prediction head. This innovative approach empowers the network to simultaneously predict masks and depth, enhancing its ability to capture nuanced depth-related information during the instance segmentation process. We further utilize the mask generated in the training process as supervision to distinguish the foreground from the background. When selecting the best mask for each box through the Hungarian algorithm, we use depth consistency as one calculation cost item. The proposed method achieves significant improvements on Cityscapes and COCO dataset.

Xinyi Yu, Zhiwei Lin, Yongtao Wang

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) object detection faces significant challenges from speckle noise, small target ambiguities, and on-board computational constraints. While existing approaches predominantly focus on SAR-specific architectural modifications, this paper explores the application of the existing lightweight object detector, i.e., YOLOv10, for SAR object detection and enhances its performance through Neural Architecture Search (NAS). Specifically, we employ NAS to systematically optimize the network structure, especially focusing on the backbone architecture search. By constructing an extensive search space and leveraging evolutionary search, our method identifies a favorable architecture that balances accuracy, parameter efficiency, and computational cost. Notably, this work introduces NAS to SAR object detection for the first time. The experimental results on the large-scale SARDet-100K dataset demonstrate that our optimized model outperforms existing SAR detection methods, achieving superior detection accuracy while maintaining lower computational overhead. We hope this work offers a novel perspective on leveraging NAS for real-world applications.

Jintao Rong, Xin Xie, Xinyi Yu et al.

Distilled video generation models offer fast and efficient synthesis but struggle with motion customization when guided by reference videos, especially under training-free settings. Existing training-free methods, originally designed for standard diffusion models, fail to generalize due to the accelerated generative process and large denoising steps in distilled models. To address this, we propose MotionEcho, a novel training-free test-time distillation framework that enables motion customization by leveraging diffusion teacher forcing. Our approach uses high-quality, slow teacher models to guide the inference of fast student models through endpoint prediction and interpolation. To maintain efficiency, we dynamically allocate computation across timesteps according to guidance needs. Extensive experiments across various distilled video generation models and benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves motion fidelity and generation quality while preserving high efficiency. Project page: https://euminds.github.io/motionecho/

Wancai Zheng, Linlin Ou, Jiajie He et al.

Recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) techniques for Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) have significantly progressed in tracking and high-fidelity mapping. However, their sequential optimization framework and sensitivity to dynamic objects limit real-time performance and robustness in real-world scenarios. We present UP-SLAM, a real-time RGB-D SLAM system for dynamic environments that decouples tracking and mapping through a parallelized framework. A probabilistic octree is employed to manage Gaussian primitives adaptively, enabling efficient initialization and pruning without hand-crafted thresholds. To robustly filter dynamic regions during tracking, we propose a training-free uncertainty estimator that fuses multi-modal residuals to estimate per-pixel motion uncertainty, achieving open-set dynamic object handling without reliance on semantic labels. Furthermore, a temporal encoder is designed to enhance rendering quality. Concurrently, low-dimensional features are efficiently transformed via a shallow multilayer perceptron to construct DINO features, which are then employed to enrich the Gaussian field and improve the robustness of uncertainty prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple challenging datasets suggest that UP-SLAM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both localization accuracy (by 59.8%) and rendering quality (by 4.57 dB PSNR), while maintaining real-time performance and producing reusable, artifact-free static maps in dynamic environments.The project: https://aczheng-cai.github.io/up_slam.github.io/

Xinyi Yu, Weiqi He, Xuecheng Qian et al.

Accurate rail location is a crucial part in the railway support driving system for safety monitoring. LiDAR can obtain point clouds that carry 3D information for the railway environment, especially in darkness and terrible weather conditions. In this paper, a real-time rail recognition method based on 3D point clouds is proposed to solve the challenges, such as disorderly, uneven density and large volume of the point clouds. A voxel down-sampling method is first presented for density balanced of railway point clouds, and pyramid partition is designed to divide the 3D scanning area into the voxels with different volumes. Then, a feature encoding module is developed to find the nearest neighbor points and to aggregate their local geometric features for the center point. Finally, a multi-scale neural network is proposed to generate the prediction results of each voxel and the rail location. The experiments are conducted under 9 sequences of 3D point cloud data for the railway. The results show that the method has good performance in detecting straight, curved and other complex topologies rails.

Xinyi Yu, Ling Yan, Yang Yang et al.

Knowledge distillation has made remarkable achievements in model compression. However, most existing methods require the original training data, which is usually unavailable due to privacy and security issues. In this paper, we propose a conditional generative data-free knowledge distillation (CGDD) framework for training lightweight networks without any training data. This method realizes efficient knowledge distillation based on conditional image generation. Specifically, we treat the preset labels as ground truth to train a conditional generator in a semi-supervised manner. The trained generator can produce specified classes of training images. For training the student network, we force it to extract the knowledge hidden in teacher feature maps, which provide crucial cues for the learning process. Moreover, an adversarial training framework for promoting distillation performance is constructed by designing several loss functions. This framework helps the student model to explore larger data space. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments on different datasets. Compared with other data-free works, our work obtains state-of-the-art results on CIFAR100, Caltech101, and different versions of ImageNet datasets. The codes will be released.

Xinyi Yu, Siyu Xu, Yuehai Fan et al.

To solve the coupling problem of control loops and the adaptive parameter tuning problem in the multi-input multi-output (MIMO) PID control system, a self-adaptive LSAC-PID algorithm is proposed based on deep reinforcement learning (RL) and Lyapunov-based reward shaping in this paper. For complex and unknown mobile robot control environment, an RL-based MIMO PID hybrid control strategy is firstly presented. According to the dynamic information and environmental feedback of the mobile robot, the RL agent can output the optimal MIMO PID parameters in real time, without knowing mathematical model and decoupling multiple control loops. Then, to improve the convergence speed of RL and the stability of mobile robots, a Lyapunov-based reward shaping soft actor-critic (LSAC) algorithm is proposed based on Lyapunov theory and potential-based reward shaping method. The convergence and optimality of the algorithm are proved in terms of the policy evaluation and improvement step of soft policy iteration. In addition, for line-following robots, the region growing method is improved to adapt to the influence of forks and environmental interference. Through comparison, test and cross-validation, the simulation and real-environment experimental results all show good performance of the proposed LSAC-PID tuning algorithm.

Jingtao Rong, Xinyi Yu, Mingyang Zhang et al.

Adequate labeled data and expensive compute resources are the prerequisites for the success of neural architecture search(NAS). It is challenging to apply NAS in meta-learning scenarios with limited compute resources and data. In this paper, an across-task neural architecture search (AT-NAS) is proposed to address the problem through combining gradient-based meta-learning with EA-based NAS to learn over the distribution of tasks. The supernet is learned over an entire set of tasks by meta-learning its weights. Architecture encodes of subnets sampled from the supernet are iteratively adapted by evolutionary algorithms while simultaneously searching for a task-sensitive meta-network. Searched meta-network can be adapted to a novel task via a few learning steps and only costs a little search time. Empirical results show that AT-NAS surpasses the related approaches on few-shot classification accuracy. The performance of AT-NAS on classification benchmarks is comparable to that of models searched from scratch, by adapting the architecture in less than an hour from a 5-GPU-day pretrained meta-network.

Xinyi Yu, Mi Lin, Jiangping Lu et al.

Oriented object detection is a challenging task in aerial images since the objects in aerial images are displayed in arbitrary directions and are frequently densely packed. The mainstream detectors describe rotating objects using a five-parament or eight-parament representations, which suffer from representation ambiguity for orientated object definition. In this paper, we propose a novel representation method based on area ratio of parallelogram, called ARP. Specifically, ARP regresses the minimum bounding rectangle of the oriented object and three area ratios. Three area ratios include the area ratio of a directed object to the smallest circumscribed rectangle and two parallelograms to the minimum circumscribed rectangle. It simplifies offset learning and eliminates the issue of angular periodicity or label point sequences for oriented objects. To further remedy the confusion issue of nearly horizontal objects, the area ratio between the object and its minimal circumscribed rectangle is employed to guide the selection of horizontal or oriented detection for each object. Moreover, the rotated efficient Intersection over Union (R-EIoU) loss with horizontal bounding box and three area ratios are designed to optimize the bounding box regression for rotating objects. Experimental results on remote sensing datasets, including HRSC2016, DOTA, and UCAS-AOD, show that our method achieves superior detection performance than many state-of-the-art approaches.

Mingyang Zhang, Xinyi Yu, Jingtao Rong et al.

In the past years, significant improvements in the field of neural architecture search(NAS) have been made. However, it is still challenging to search for efficient networks due to the gap between the searched constraint and real inference time exists. To search for a high-performance network with low inference time, several previous works set a computational complexity constraint for the search algorithm. However, many factors affect the speed of inference(e.g., FLOPs, MACs). The correlation between a single indicator and the latency is not strong. Currently, some re-parameterization(Rep) techniques are proposed to convert multi-branch to single-path architecture which is inference-friendly. Nevertheless, multi-branch architectures are still human-defined and inefficient. In this work, we propose a new search space that is suitable for structural re-parameterization techniques. RepNAS, a one-stage NAS approach, is present to efficiently search the optimal diverse branch block(ODBB) for each layer under the branch number constraint. Our experimental results show the searched ODBB can easily surpass the manual diverse branch block(DBB) with efficient training.

Weichen Chen, Xinyi Yu, Linlin Ou

Pedestrian attribute recognition in surveillance scenarios is still a challenging task due to the inaccurate localization of specific attributes. In this paper, we propose a novel view-attribute localization method based on attention (VALA), which utilizes view information to guide the recognition process to focus on specific attributes and attention mechanism to localize specific attribute-corresponding areas. Concretely, view information is leveraged by the view prediction branch to generate four view weights that represent the confidences for attributes from different views. View weights are then delivered back to compose specific view-attributes, which will participate and supervise deep feature extraction. In order to explore the spatial location of a view-attribute, regional attention is introduced to aggregate spatial information and encode inter-channel dependencies of the view feature. Subsequently, a fine attentive attribute-specific region is localized, and regional weights for the view-attribute from different spatial locations are gained by the regional attention. The final view-attribute recognition outcome is obtained by combining the view weights with the regional weights. Experiments on three wide datasets (RAP, RAPv2, and PA-100K) demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Xinyi Yu, Yuehai Fan, Siyu Xu et al.

Proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control is the most widely used in industrial control, robot control and other fields. However, traditional PID control is not competent when the system cannot be accurately modeled and the operating environment is variable in real time. To tackle these problems, we propose a self-adaptive model-free SAC-PID control approach based on reinforcement learning for automatic control of mobile robots. A new hierarchical structure is developed, which includes the upper controller based on soft actor-critic (SAC), one of the most competitive continuous control algorithms, and the lower controller based on incremental PID controller. Soft actor-critic receives the dynamic information of the mobile robot as input, and simultaneously outputs the optimal parameters of incremental PID controllers to compensate for the error between the path and the mobile robot in real time. In addition, the combination of 24-neighborhood method and polynomial fitting is developed to improve the adaptability of SAC-PID control method to complex environments. The effectiveness of the SAC-PID control method is verified with several different difficulty paths both on Gazebo and real mecanum mobile robot. Futhermore, compared with fuzzy PID control, the SAC-PID method has merits of strong robustness, generalization and real-time performance.

Mingyang Zhang, Xinyi Yu, Jingtao Rong et al.

Automated Machine Learning(Auto-ML) pruning methods aim at searching a pruning strategy automatically to reduce the computational complexity of deep Convolutional Neural Networks(deep CNNs). However, some previous work found that the results of many Auto-ML pruning methods cannot even surpass the results of the uniformly pruning method. In this paper, the ineffectiveness of Auto-ML pruning which is caused by unfull and unfair training of the supernet is shown. A deep supernet suffers from unfull training because it contains too many candidates. To overcome the unfull training, a stage-wise pruning(SWP) method is proposed, which splits a deep supernet into several stage-wise supernets to reduce the candidate number and utilize inplace distillation to supervise the stage training. Besides, A wide supernet is hit by unfair training since the sampling probability of each channel is unequal. Therefore, the fullnet and the tinynet are sampled in each training iteration to ensure each channel can be overtrained. Remarkably, the proxy performance of the subnets trained with SWP is closer to the actual performance than that of most of the previous Auto-ML pruning work. Experiments show that SWP achieves the state-of-the-art on both CIFAR-10 and ImageNet under the mobile setting.

Michael Gleicher, Aditya Barve, Xinyi Yu et al.

Machine learning practitioners often compare the results of different classifiers to help select, diagnose and tune models. We present Boxer, a system to enable such comparison. Our system facilitates interactive exploration of the experimental results obtained by applying multiple classifiers to a common set of model inputs. The approach focuses on allowing the user to identify interesting subsets of training and testing instances and comparing performance of the classifiers on these subsets. The system couples standard visual designs with set algebra interactions and comparative elements. This allows the user to compose and coordinate views to specify subsets and assess classifier performance on them. The flexibility of these compositions allow the user to address a wide range of scenarios in developing and assessing classifiers. We demonstrate Boxer in use cases including model selection, tuning, fairness assessment, and data quality diagnosis.

Mingyang Zhang, Xinyi Yu, Jingtao Rong et al.

Previous AutoML pruning works utilized individual layer features to automatically prune filters. We analyze the correlation for two layers from the different blocks which have a short-cut structure. It shows that, in one block, the deeper layer has many redundant filters which can be represented by filters in the former layer. So, it is necessary to take information from other layers into consideration in pruning. In this paper, a novel pruning method, named GraphPruning, is proposed. Any series of the network is viewed as a graph. To automatically aggregate neighboring features for each node, a graph aggregator based on graph convolution networks(GCN) is designed. In the training stage, a PruningNet that is given aggregated node features generates reasonable weights for any size of the sub-network. Subsequently, the best configuration of the Pruned Network is searched by reinforcement learning. Different from previous work, we take the node features from a well-trained graph aggregator instead of the hand-craft features, as the states in reinforcement learning. Compared with other AutoML pruning works, our method has achieved the state-of-the-art under the same conditions on ImageNet-2012.