Mahadev Satyanarayanan

Gil Goldman, Raja Giryes, Mahadev Satyanarayanan

We propose a smooth regularization technique that instills a strong temporal inductive bias in video recognition models, particularly benefiting lightweight architectures. Our method encourages smoothness in the intermediate-layer embeddings of consecutive frames by modeling their changes as a Gaussian Random Walk (GRW). This penalizes abrupt representational shifts, thereby promoting low-acceleration solutions that better align with the natural temporal coherence inherent in videos. By leveraging this enforced smoothness, lightweight models can more effectively capture complex temporal dynamics. Applied to such models, our technique yields a 3.8% to 6.4% accuracy improvement on Kinetics-600. Notably, the MoViNets model family trained with our smooth regularization improves the current state of the art by 3.8% to 6.1% within their respective FLOP constraints, while MobileNetV3 and the MoViNets-Stream family achieve gains of 4.9% to 6.4% over prior state-of-the-art models with comparable memory footprints. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/cmusatyalab/grw-smoothing.

Haithem Turki, Deva Ramanan, Mahadev Satyanarayanan

We use neural radiance fields (NeRFs) to build interactive 3D environments from large-scale visual captures spanning buildings or even multiple city blocks collected primarily from drones. In contrast to single object scenes (on which NeRFs are traditionally evaluated), our scale poses multiple challenges including (1) the need to model thousands of images with varying lighting conditions, each of which capture only a small subset of the scene, (2) prohibitively large model capacities that make it infeasible to train on a single GPU, and (3) significant challenges for fast rendering that would enable interactive fly-throughs. To address these challenges, we begin by analyzing visibility statistics for large-scale scenes, motivating a sparse network structure where parameters are specialized to different regions of the scene. We introduce a simple geometric clustering algorithm for data parallelism that partitions training images (or rather pixels) into different NeRF submodules that can be trained in parallel. We evaluate our approach on existing datasets (Quad 6k and UrbanScene3D) as well as against our own drone footage, improving training speed by 3x and PSNR by 12%. We also evaluate recent NeRF fast renderers on top of Mega-NeRF and introduce a novel method that exploits temporal coherence. Our technique achieves a 40x speedup over conventional NeRF rendering while remaining within 0.8 db in PSNR quality, exceeding the fidelity of existing fast renderers.

Truong An Pham, Junjue Wang, Yu Xiao et al.

Wearable Cognitive Assistance (WCA) amplifies human cognition in real time through a wearable device and low-latency wireless access to edge computing infrastructure. It is inspired by, and broadens, the metaphor of GPS navigation tools that provide real-time step-by-step guidance, with prompt error detection and correction. WCA applications are likely to be transformative in education, health care, industrial troubleshooting, manufacturing, and many other areas. Today, WCA application development is difficult and slow, requiring skills in areas such as machine learning and computer vision that are not widespread among software developers. This paper describes Ajalon, an authoring toolchain for WCA applications that reduces the skill and effort needed at each step of the development pipeline. Our evaluation shows that Ajalon significantly reduces the effort needed to create new WCA applications.