Jun Luo

Tianyue Zheng, Ang Li, Zhe Chen et al.

Object detection with on-board sensors (e.g., lidar, radar, and camera) play a crucial role in autonomous driving (AD), and these sensors complement each other in modalities. While crowdsensing may potentially exploit these sensors (of huge quantity) to derive more comprehensive knowledge, \textit{federated learning} (FL) appears to be the necessary tool to reach this potential: it enables autonomous vehicles (AVs) to train machine learning models without explicitly sharing raw sensory data. However, the multimodal sensors introduce various data heterogeneity across distributed AVs (e.g., label quantity skews and varied modalities), posing critical challenges to effective FL. To this end, we present AutoFed as a heterogeneity-aware FL framework to fully exploit multimodal sensory data on AVs and thus enable robust AD. Specifically, we first propose a novel model leveraging pseudo-labeling to avoid mistakenly treating unlabeled objects as the background. We also propose an autoencoder-based data imputation method to fill missing data modality (of certain AVs) with the available ones. To further reconcile the heterogeneity, we finally present a client selection mechanism exploiting the similarities among client models to improve both training stability and convergence rate. Our experiments on benchmark dataset confirm that AutoFed substantially improves over status quo approaches in both precision and recall, while demonstrating strong robustness to adverse weather conditions.

Shujie Zhang, Tianyue Zheng, Zhe Chen et al.

Hand Pose Estimation (HPE) is crucial to many applications, but conventional cameras-based CM-HPE methods are completely subject to Line-of-Sight (LoS), as cameras cannot capture occluded objects. In this paper, we propose to exploit Radio-Frequency-Vision (RF-vision) capable of bypassing obstacles for achieving occluded HPE, and we introduce OCHID-Fi as the first RF-HPE method with 3D pose estimation capability. OCHID-Fi employs wideband RF sensors widely available on smart devices (e.g., iPhones) to probe 3D human hand pose and extract their skeletons behind obstacles. To overcome the challenge in labeling RF imaging given its human incomprehensible nature, OCHID-Fi employs a cross-modality and cross-domain training process. It uses a pre-trained CM-HPE network and a synchronized CM/RF dataset, to guide the training of its complex-valued RF-HPE network under LoS conditions. It further transfers knowledge learned from labeled LoS domain to unlabeled occluded domain via adversarial learning, enabling OCHID-Fi to generalize to unseen occluded scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of OCHID-Fi: it achieves comparable accuracy to CM-HPE under normal conditions while maintaining such accuracy even in occluded scenarios, with empirical evidence for its generalizability to new domains.

Pengfei Hu, Yuhang Qian, Tianyue Zheng et al.

Given the wide adoption of multimodal sensors (e.g., camera, lidar, radar) by autonomous vehicles (AVs), deep analytics to fuse their outputs for a robust perception become imperative. However, existing fusion methods often make two assumptions rarely holding in practice: i) similar data distributions for all inputs and ii) constant availability for all sensors. Because, for example, lidars have various resolutions and failures of radars may occur, such variability often results in significant performance degradation in fusion. To this end, we present tREADi, an adaptive inference system that accommodates the variability of multimodal sensory data and thus enables robust and efficient perception. t-READi identifies variation-sensitive yet structure-specific model parameters; it then adapts only these parameters while keeping the rest intact. t-READi also leverages a cross-modality contrastive learning method to compensate for the loss from missing modalities. Both functions are implemented to maintain compatibility with existing multimodal deep fusion methods. The extensive experiments evidently demonstrate that compared with the status quo approaches, t-READi not only improves the average inference accuracy by more than 6% but also reduces the inference latency by almost 15x with the cost of only 5% extra memory overhead in the worst case under realistic data and modal variations.

Bang An, Xun Zhou, Zirui Zhou et al.

The problem of forecasting spatiotemporal events such as crimes and accidents is crucial to public safety and city management. Besides accuracy, interpretability is also a key requirement for spatiotemporal forecasting models to justify the decisions. Interpretation of the spatiotemporal forecasting mechanism is, however, challenging due to the complexity of multi-source spatiotemporal features, the non-intuitive nature of spatiotemporal patterns for non-expert users, and the presence of spatial heterogeneity in the data. Currently, no existing deep learning model intrinsically interprets the complex predictive process learned from multi-source spatiotemporal features. To bridge the gap, we propose GeoPro-Net, an intrinsically interpretable spatiotemporal model for spatiotemporal event forecasting problems. GeoPro-Net introduces a novel Geo-concept convolution operation, which employs statistical tests to extract predictive patterns in the input as Geo-concepts, and condenses the Geo-concept-encoded input through interpretable channel fusion and geographic-based pooling. In addition, GeoPro-Net learns different sets of prototypes of concepts inherently, and projects them to real-world cases for interpretation. Comprehensive experiments and case studies on four real-world datasets demonstrate that GeoPro-Net provides better interpretability while still achieving competitive prediction performance compared with state-of-the-art baselines.