Xiaobo Liu

Pascal den Boef, Patrick Kürschner, Xiaobo Liu et al.

Reduced rank extrapolation (RRE) is an acceleration method typically used to accelerate the iterative solution of nonlinear systems of equations using a fixed-point process. In this context, the iterates are vectors generated from a fixed-point mapping function. However, when considering the iterative solution of large-scale matrix equations, the iterates are low-rank matrices generated from a fixed-point process for which, generally, the mapping function changes in each iteration. To enable acceleration of the iterative solution for these problems, we propose two novel generalizations of RRE. First, we show how to effectively compute RRE for sequences of low-rank matrices. Second, we derive a formulation of RRE that is suitable for fixed-point processes for which the mapping function changes each iteration. We demonstrate the potential of the methods on several numerical examples involving the iterative solution of large-scale Lyapunov and Riccati matrix equations.

Xiaobo Liu, Xudong Han, Wei Hong et al.

Proprioception is the "sixth sense" that detects limb postures with motor neurons. It requires a natural integration between the musculoskeletal systems and sensory receptors, which is challenging among modern robots that aim for lightweight, adaptive, and sensitive designs at a low cost. Here, we present the Soft Polyhedral Network with an embedded vision for physical interactions, capable of adaptive kinesthesia and viscoelastic proprioception by learning kinetic features. This design enables passive adaptations to omni-directional interactions, visually captured by a miniature high-speed motion tracking system embedded inside for proprioceptive learning. The results show that the soft network can infer real-time 6D forces and torques with accuracies of 0.25/0.24/0.35 N and 0.025/0.034/0.006 Nm in dynamic interactions. We also incorporate viscoelasticity in proprioception during static adaptation by adding a creep and relaxation modifier to refine the predicted results. The proposed soft network combines simplicity in design, omni-adaptation, and proprioceptive sensing with high accuracy, making it a versatile solution for robotics at a low cost with more than 1 million use cycles for tasks such as sensitive and competitive grasping, and touch-based geometry reconstruction. This study offers new insights into vision-based proprioception for soft robots in adaptive grasping, soft manipulation, and human-robot interaction.

Ning Guo, Xudong Han, Xiaobo Liu et al.

Robots play a critical role as the physical agent of human operators in exploring the ocean. However, it remains challenging to grasp objects reliably while fully submerging under a highly pressurized aquatic environment with little visible light, mainly due to the fluidic interference on the tactile mechanics between the finger and object surfaces. This study investigates the transferability of grasping knowledge from on-land to underwater via a vision-based soft robotic finger that learns 6D forces and torques (FT) using a Supervised Variational Autoencoder (SVAE). A high-framerate camera captures the whole-body deformations while a soft robotic finger interacts with physical objects on-land and underwater. Results show that the trained SVAE model learned a series of latent representations of the soft mechanics transferrable from land to water, presenting a superior adaptation to the changing environments against commercial FT sensors. Soft, delicate, and reactive grasping enabled by tactile intelligence enhances the gripper's underwater interaction with improved reliability and robustness at a much-reduced cost, paving the path for learning-based intelligent grasping to support fundamental scientific discoveries in environmental and ocean research.

Kun Qiu, Harry Chang, Ying Wang et al.

Sophisticated traffic analytics, such as the encrypted traffic analytics and unknown malware detection, emphasizes the need for advanced methods to analyze the network traffic. Traditional methods of using fixed patterns, signature matching, and rules to detect known patterns in network traffic are being replaced with AI (Artificial Intelligence) driven algorithms. However, the absence of a high-performance AI networking-specific framework makes deploying real-time AI-based processing within networking workloads impossible. In this paper, we describe the design of Traffic Analytics Development Kits (TADK), an industry-standard framework specific for AI-based networking workloads processing. TADK can provide real-time AI-based networking workload processing in networking equipment from the data center out to the edge without the need for specialized hardware (e.g., GPUs, Neural Processing Unit, and so on). We have deployed TADK in commodity WAF and 5G UPF, and the evaluation result shows that TADK can achieve a throughput up to 35.3Gbps per core on traffic feature extraction, 6.5Gbps per core on traffic classification, and can decrease SQLi/XSS detection down to 4.5us per request with higher accuracy than fixed pattern solution.

Shunlai Cui, Peng Cao, Yuan Zhu et al.

LiDAR model selection is a critical issue in roadside sensing systems, as it directly determines both perception capability and deployment cost. However, the lack of empirical benchmarks for comparing perception performance across different LiDAR configurations has greatly constrained scientific sensor selection and deployment planning. To address this gap, we present MR-LiDAR, a controlled multi-resolution LiDAR benchmark for roadside perception diagnostics. Using 16-, 32-, 80-, and 128-beam LiDARs in identical roadside scenarios, we collect point clouds and ground-truth annotations for diverse traffic participants, including vehicles and vulnerable road users (VRUs), across varying distances. This controlled design isolates intrinsic LiDAR specifications, particularly beam count and beam distribution, as the key variables for precise performance diagnostics. Based on MR-LiDAR, we conduct systematic empirical analyses to examine how beam count, beam distribution, target distance, object category, and vehicle occlusion affect LiDAR perception performance. The results reveal that all of these factors have substantial impacts. In particular, contrary to the common assumption that higher beam counts always yield better perception, we show that an 80-beam LiDAR with optimized beam distribution can match or even outperform a 128-beam LiDAR with uniform beam distribution. In addition, we provide a practical reference guide for LiDAR selection, including target point-count statistics and detection performance comparisons based on two widely used detection algorithms. This work offers a diagnostic benchmark and practical guidance for determining cost-effective LiDAR configurations in roadside perception applications.

Peter Benner, Xiaobo Liu

We develop a mixed-precision iterative refinement framework for solving low-rank Lyapunov matrix equations $AX + XA^T + W =0$, where $W=LL^T$ or $W=LSL^T$. Via rounding error analysis of the algorithms we derive sufficient conditions for the attainable normwise residuals in different precision settings and show how the algorithmic parameters should be chosen. These conditions are independent of the choice of inner solver, provided that the prescribed residual accuracy is attained in the inner solves. Using the sign-function Newton iteration as the solver, we demonstrate that reduced precisions, such as half precision with unit roundoff $u_s$, can be used efficiently for Lyapunov equations with condition numbers of order $1/u_s$ without compromising the attainable solution quality. This provides an algorithmic framework towards exploiting native low-precision hardware to accelerate Lyapunov solvers without sacrificing accuracy.

Ni Dong, Shuming Chen, Yina Wu et al.

Navigating automated driving systems (ADSs) through complex driving environments is difficult. Predicting the driving behavior of surrounding human-driven vehicles (HDVs) is a critical component of an ADS. This paper proposes an enhanced motion-planning approach for an ADS in a highway-merging scenario. The proposed enhanced approach utilizes the results of two aspects: the driving behavior and long-term trajectory of surrounding HDVs, which are coupled using a hierarchical model that is used for the motion planning of an ADS to improve driving safety.

Andrii Dmytryshyn, Massimiliano Fasi, Nicholas J. Higham et al.

We consider the solution of the Sylvester equation $AX+XB=C$ in mixed precision. We derive a new iterative refinement scheme to solve perturbed quasi-triangular Sylvester equations; our rounding error analysis provides sufficient conditions for convergence and a bound on the attainable relative residual. We leverage this iterative scheme to solve the general Sylvester equation. The new algorithms compute the Schur decomposition of the coefficient matrices $A$ and $B$ in lower than working precision, use the low-precision Schur factors to obtain an approximate solution to the perturbed quasi-triangular equation, and iteratively refine it to obtain a working-precision solution. In order to solve the original equation to working precision, the unitary Schur factors of the coefficient matrices must be unitary to working precision, but this is not the case if the Schur decomposition is computed in low precision. We propose two effective approaches to address this: one is based on re-orthonormalization in working precision, and the other on explicit inversion of the almost-unitary factors. The two mixed-precision algorithms thus obtained are tested on various Sylvester and Lyapunov equations from the literature. Our numerical experiments show that, for both types of equations, the new algorithms are at least as accurate as existing ones. Our cost analysis, on the other hand, suggests that they would typically be faster than mono-precision alternatives if implemented on hardware that natively supports low precision.

Xiaobo Liu

MLE-Toolbox is a comprehensive open-source MATLAB toolbox for end-to-end analysis of magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) data. Inspired by widely used neuroimaging platforms such as Brainstorm and FieldTrip, it integrates the full analysis pipeline within a unified and user-friendly graphical interface (GUI), covering raw data import, preprocessing, source localization, functional connectivity, oscillatory analysis, and machine learning-based classification. The toolbox includes automated artifact rejection methods, including independent component analysis (ICA), signal-space projection (SSP), and signal-space separation (SSS); multiple source localization approaches, including minimum norm estimation (MNE), dynamic statistical parametric mapping (dSPM), standardized low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography (sLORETA), and beamforming; multi-atlas parcellation with anatomical visualization; spectral power analysis with frequency-band brain mapping; phase-amplitude coupling (PAC); graph-theoretic brain network analysis; and integrated machine learning and deep learning classifiers. MLE-Toolbox also provides native interoperability with Brainstorm, FieldTrip, EEGLAB, and FreeSurfer, allowing researchers to build on established workflows while benefiting from additional automation, interactive visualization, and one-click academic report generation. Freely available for non-commercial use, MLE-Toolbox is designed to lower the barrier to rigorous, reproducible MEG/EEG research.

Erin Carson, Xinye Chen, Xiaobo Liu

The k-means algorithm is one of the most popular and critical techniques in data mining and machine learning, and it has achieved significant success in numerous science and engineering domains. Computing k-means to a global optimum is NP-hard in Euclidean space, yet there are a variety of efficient heuristic algorithms, such as Lloyd's algorithm, that converge to a local optimum with superpolynomial complexity in the worst case. Motivated by the emergence and prominence of mixed precision capabilities in hardware, a current trend is to develop low and mixed precision variants of algorithms in order to improve the runtime and energy consumption. In this paper we study the numerical stability of Lloyd's k-means algorithm, and, in particular, we confirm the stability of the widely used distance computation formula. We propose a mixed-precision framework for k-means computation and investigate the effects of low-precision distance computation within the framework. Through extensive simulations on various data clustering and image segmentation tasks, we verify the applicability and robustness of the mixed precision k-means method. We find that, in k-means computation, normalized data is more tolerant to the reduction of precision in the distance computation, while for unnormalized data more care is needed in the use of reduced precision, mainly to avoid overflow. Our study demonstrates the potential for the use of mixed precision distance kernels to accelerate the k-means computation and offers insights into other distance-based machine learning methods.

Yaoming Cai, Zijia Zhang, Zhihua Cai et al.

This paper presents FLGC, a simple yet effective fully linear graph convolutional network for semi-supervised and unsupervised learning. Instead of using gradient descent, we train FLGC based on computing a global optimal closed-form solution with a decoupled procedure, resulting in a generalized linear framework and making it easier to implement, train, and apply. We show that (1) FLGC is powerful to deal with both graph-structured data and regular data, (2) training graph convolutional models with closed-form solutions improve computational efficiency without degrading performance, and (3) FLGC acts as a natural generalization of classic linear models in the non-Euclidean domain, e.g., ridge regression and subspace clustering. Furthermore, we implement a semi-supervised FLGC and an unsupervised FLGC by introducing an initial residual strategy, enabling FLGC to aggregate long-range neighborhoods and alleviate over-smoothing. We compare our semi-supervised and unsupervised FLGCs against many state-of-the-art methods on a variety of classification and clustering benchmarks, demonstrating that the proposed FLGC models consistently outperform previous methods in terms of accuracy, robustness, and learning efficiency. The core code of our FLGC is released at https://github.com/AngryCai/FLGC.

Zhanxin Hao, Xiaobo Liu, Jiaxin Fan et al.

This study adopts an integrated distributed cognition and regulation of learning perspective to examine the collaboration patterns and dynamics of human-AI collaboration when college students collaborating with AI for complex problem-solving. Through cluster analysis, three distinct collaborative problem-solving modes were identified in this study: Delegated Reasoning (DR), Concerted Interpretation (CI), and Delegated Elaboration (DE). This study found that the DR group achieved the highest task performance, significantly outperforming the CI group. Additionally, the semantic similarity between human and AI discourse was notably the highest in the DR group. In contrast, the CI group reported significantly greater use of self-regulation strategies. These findings uncover a critical tension between the efficiency of the distributed system and the depth of human learners regulatory engagement. Insights from this study offer valuable implications for the future design of AI-empowered educational tools and student-AI collaborative learning frameworks.

Jiawei Chen, Xintian Shen, Lihao Zheng et al.

Traditional workflow-based agents exhibit limited intelligence when addressing real-world problems requiring tool invocation. Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) agents capable of autonomous reasoning and tool invocation are rapidly emerging as a powerful approach for complex decision-making tasks involving multi-step interactions with external environments. In this work, we introduce MindWatcher, a TIR agent integrating interleaved thinking and multimodal chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. MindWatcher can autonomously decide whether and how to invoke diverse tools and coordinate their use, without relying on human prompts or workflows. The interleaved thinking paradigm enables the model to switch between thinking and tool calling at any intermediate stage, while its multimodal CoT capability allows manipulation of images during reasoning to yield more precise search results. We implement automated data auditing and evaluation pipelines, complemented by manually curated high-quality datasets for training, and we construct a benchmark, called MindWatcher-Evaluate Bench (MWE-Bench), to evaluate its performance. MindWatcher is equipped with a comprehensive suite of auxiliary reasoning tools, enabling it to address broad-domain multimodal problems. A large-scale, high-quality local image retrieval database, covering eight categories including cars, animals, and plants, endows model with robust object recognition despite its small size. Finally, we design a more efficient training infrastructure for MindWatcher, enhancing training speed and hardware utilization. Experiments not only demonstrate that MindWatcher matches or exceeds the performance of larger or more recent models through superior tool invocation, but also uncover critical insights for agent training, such as the genetic inheritance phenomenon in agentic RL.

Peter Benner, Pascal den Boef, Patrick Kürschner et al.

We investigate the acceleration of stationary iterations for multi-term Sylvester equation by means of reduced rank extrapolation (RRE). Theoretical convergence results and implementations are provided for both small and large-scale problems. For the large-scale problems, an inexact non-stationary iteration is discussed, which makes use of low-rank matrix approximations. Numerical experiments illustrate the potential of the RRE acceleration which often leads to a substantial gain in convergence speed and therefore reducing the consumption of storage and computing time.

Yanwen Wang, Xinglin Zhao, Yijin Song et al.

Functional connectivity (FC) derived from resting-state fMRI plays a critical role in personalized predictions such as age and cognitive performance. However, applying foundation models(FM) to fMRI data remains challenging due to its high dimensionality, computational complexity, and the difficulty in capturing complex spatiotemporal dynamics and indirect region-of-interest (ROI) interactions. To address these limitations, we propose a modular neuroimaging framework that integrates principles from FM with efficient, domain-specific architectures. Our approach begins with a Local Masked Autoencoder (LMAE) for pretraining, which reduces the influence of hemodynamic response function (HRF) dynamics and suppresses noise. This is followed by a Random Walk Mixture of Experts (RWMOE) module that clusters features across spatial and temporal dimensions, effectively capturing intricate brain interactions. Finally, a state-space model (SSM)-based predictor performs downstream task inference. Evaluated on the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) dataset, our framework achieved mean absolute errors (MAEs) of 5.343 for age prediction and 2.940 for fluid intelligence, with Pearson correlation coefficients (PCCs) of 0.928 and 0.887, respectively-outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods. Visualization of expert distribution weights further enhances interpretability by identifying key brain regions. This work provides a robust, interpretable alternative to LLM-based approaches for fMRI analysis, offering novel insights into brain aging and cognitive function.

Xinglin Zhao, Yanwen Wang, Xiaobo Liu et al.

Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems play a crucial role in analyzing neuroimaging data for neurological and psychiatric disorders. However, small-sample studies suffer from low reproducibility, while large-scale datasets introduce confounding heterogeneity due to multiple disease subtypes being labeled under a single category. To address these challenges, we propose a novel federated learning framework tailored for neuroimaging CAD systems. Our approach includes a dynamic navigation module that routes samples to the most suitable local models based on latent subtype representations, and a meta-integration module that combines predictions from heterogeneous local models into a unified diagnostic output. We evaluated our framework using a comprehensive dataset comprising fMRI data from over 1300 MDD patients and 1100 healthy controls across multiple study cohorts. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in diagnostic accuracy and robustness compared to traditional methods. Specifically, our framework achieved an average accuracy of 74.06\% across all tested sites, showcasing its effectiveness in handling subtype heterogeneity and enhancing model generalizability. Ablation studies further confirmed the importance of both the dynamic navigation and meta-integration modules in improving performance. By addressing data heterogeneity and subtype confounding, our framework advances reliable and reproducible neuroimaging CAD systems, offering significant potential for personalized medicine and clinical decision-making in neurology and psychiatry.

Xin Wen, Shijie Guo, Wenbo Ning et al.

Neuro-developmental disorders are manifested as dysfunctions in cognition, communication, behaviour and adaptability, and deep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) can alleviate the increasingly strained healthcare resources on neuroimaging. However, neuroimaging such as fMRI contains complex spatio-temporal features, which makes the corresponding representations susceptible to a variety of distractions, thus leading to less effective in CAD. For the first time, we present a Comorbidity-Informed Transfer Learning(CITL) framework for diagnosing neuro-developmental disorders using fMRI. In CITL, a new reinforced representation generation network is proposed, which first combines transfer learning with pseudo-labelling to remove interfering patterns from the temporal domain of fMRI and generates new representations using encoder-decoder architecture. The new representations are then trained in an architecturally simple classification network to obtain CAD model. In particular, the framework fully considers the comorbidity mechanisms of neuro-developmental disorders and effectively integrates them with semi-supervised learning and transfer learning, providing new perspectives on interdisciplinary. Experimental results demonstrate that CITL achieves competitive accuracies of 76.32% and 73.15% for detecting autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, respectively, which outperforms existing related transfer learning work for 7.2% and 0.5% respectively.

Xin Wen, Shijie Guo, Wenbo Ning et al.

In open data sets of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the heterogeneity of the data is typically attributed to a combination of factors, including differences in scanning procedures, the presence of confounding effects, and population diversities between multiple sites. These factors contribute to the diminished effectiveness of representation learning, which in turn affects the overall efficacy of subsequent classification procedures. To address these limitations, we propose a novel multi-site adversarial learning network (MSalNET) for fMRI-based mental disorder detection. Firstly, a representation learning module is introduced with a node information assembly (NIA) mechanism to better extract features from functional connectivity (FC). This mechanism aggregates edge information from both horizontal and vertical directions, effectively assembling node information. Secondly, to generalize the feature across sites, we proposed a site-level feature extraction module that can learn from individual FC data, which circumvents additional prior information. Lastly, an adversarial learning network is proposed as a means of balancing the trade-off between individual classification and site regression tasks, with the introduction of a novel loss function. The proposed method was evaluated on two multi-site fMRI datasets, i.e., Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) and ADHD-200. The results indicate that the proposed method achieves a better performance than other related algorithms with the accuracy of 75.56 and 68.92 in ABIDE and ADHD-200 datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the result of the site regression indicates that the proposed method reduces site variability from a data-driven perspective. The most discriminative brain regions revealed by NIA are consistent with statistical findings, uncovering the "black box" of deep learning to a certain extent.

Xiaoqiang Liu, Yubin Wang, Zicheng Huang et al.

Background: Colonoscopy, a crucial diagnostic tool in gastroenterology, depends heavily on superior bowel preparation. ChatGPT, a large language model with emergent intelligence which also exhibits potential in medical applications. This study aims to assess the accuracy and consistency of ChatGPT in using the Boston Bowel Preparation Scale (BBPS) for colonoscopy assessment. Methods: We retrospectively collected 233 colonoscopy images from 2020 to 2023. These images were evaluated using the BBPS by 3 senior endoscopists and 3 novice endoscopists. Additionally, ChatGPT also assessed these images, having been divided into three groups and undergone specific Fine-tuning. Consistency was evaluated through two rounds of testing. Results: In the initial round, ChatGPT's accuracy varied between 48.93% and 62.66%, trailing the endoscopists' accuracy of 76.68% to 77.83%. Kappa values for ChatGPT was between 0.52 and 0.53, compared to 0.75 to 0.87 for the endoscopists. Conclusion: While ChatGPT shows promise in bowel preparation scoring, it currently does not match the accuracy and consistency of experienced endoscopists. Future research should focus on in-depth Fine-tuning.

Yaoming Cai, Zijia Zhang, Yan Liu et al.

Clustering of hyperspectral images is a fundamental but challenging task. The recent development of hyperspectral image clustering has evolved from shallow models to deep and achieved promising results in many benchmark datasets. However, their poor scalability, robustness, and generalization ability, mainly resulting from their offline clustering scenarios, greatly limit their application to large-scale hyperspectral data. To circumvent these problems, we present a scalable deep online clustering model, named Spectral-Spatial Contrastive Clustering (SSCC), based on self-supervised learning. Specifically, we exploit a symmetric twin neural network comprised of a projection head with a dimensionality of the cluster number to conduct dual contrastive learning from a spectral-spatial augmentation pool. We define the objective function by implicitly encouraging within-cluster similarity and reducing between-cluster redundancy. The resulting approach is trained in an end-to-end fashion by batch-wise optimization, making it robust in large-scale data and resulting in good generalization ability for unseen data. Extensive experiments on three hyperspectral image benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and show that we advance the state-of-the-art approaches by large margins.

Xiaobo Liu, Su Yang

Objectives: Functional connectivity triggered by naturalistic stimulus (e.g., movies) and machine learning techniques provide a great insight in exploring the brain functions such as fluid intelligence. However, functional connectivity are considered to be multi-layered, while traditional machine learning based on individual models not only are limited in performance, but also fail to extract multi-dimensional and multi-layered information from brain network. Methods: In this study, inspired by multi-layer brain network structure, we propose a new method namely Weighted Ensemble-model and Network Analysis, which combines the machine learning and graph theory for improved fluid intelligence prediction. Firstly, functional connectivity analysis and graphical theory were jointly employed. The functional connectivity and graphical indices computed using the preprocessed fMRI data were then all fed into auto-encoder parallelly for feature extraction to predict the fluid intelligence. In order to improve the performance, tree regression and ridge regression model were automatically stacked and fused with weighted values. Finally, layers of auto-encoder were visualized to better illustrate the connectome patterns, followed by the evaluation of the performance to justify the mechanism of brain functions. Results: Our proposed methods achieved best performance with 3.85 mean absolute deviation, 0.66 correlation coefficient and 0.42 R-squared coefficient, outperformed other state-of-the-art methods. It is also worth noting that, the optimization of the biological pattern extraction was automated though the auto-encoder algorithm. Conclusion: The proposed method not only outperforming the state-of-the-art reports, but also able to effectively capturing the biological patterns from functional connectivity during naturalistic movies state for potential clinical explorations.

Fang Wan, Haokun Wang, Xiaobo Liu et al.

We present DeepClaw as a reconfigurable benchmark of robotic hardware and task hierarchy for robot learning. The DeepClaw benchmark aims at a mechatronics perspective of the robot learning problem, which features a minimum design of robot cell that can be easily reconfigured to host robot hardware from various vendors, including manipulators, grippers, cameras, desks, and objects, aiming at a streamlined collection of physical manipulation data and evaluation of the learned skills for hardware benchmarking. We provide a detailed design of the robot cell with readily available parts to build the experiment environment that can host a wide range of robotic hardware commonly adopted for robot learning. We also propose a hierarchical pipeline of software integration, including localization, recognition, grasp planning, and motion planning, to streamline learning-based robot control, data collection, and experiment validation towards shareability and reproducibility. We present benchmarking results of the DeepClaw system for a baseline Tic-Tac-Toe task, a bin-clearing task, and a jigsaw puzzle task using three sets of standard robotic hardware. Our results show that tasks defined in DeepClaw can be easily reproduced on three robot cells. Under the same task setup, the differences in robotic hardware used will present a non-negligible impact on the performance metrics of robot learning. All design layouts and codes are hosted on Github for open access.

Yaoming Cai, Zijia Zhang, Zhihua Cai et al.

Hyperspectral image (HSI) clustering is a challenging task due to the high complexity of HSI data. Subspace clustering has been proven to be powerful for exploiting the intrinsic relationship between data points. Despite the impressive performance in the HSI clustering, traditional subspace clustering methods often ignore the inherent structural information among data. In this paper, we revisit the subspace clustering with graph convolution and present a novel subspace clustering framework called Graph Convolutional Subspace Clustering (GCSC) for robust HSI clustering. Specifically, the framework recasts the self-expressiveness property of the data into the non-Euclidean domain, which results in a more robust graph embedding dictionary. We show that traditional subspace clustering models are the special forms of our framework with the Euclidean data. Basing on the framework, we further propose two novel subspace clustering models by using the Frobenius norm, namely Efficient GCSC (EGCSC) and Efficient Kernel GCSC (EKGCSC). Both models have a globally optimal closed-form solution, which makes them easier to implement, train, and apply in practice. Extensive experiments on three popular HSI datasets demonstrate that EGCSC and EKGCSC can achieve state-of-the-art clustering performance and dramatically outperforms many existing methods with significant margins.

Linhan Yang, Fang Wan, Haokun Wang et al.

Inspired by widely used soft fingers on grasping, we propose a method of rigid-soft interactive learning, aiming at reducing the time of data collection. In this paper, we classify the interaction categories into Rigid-Rigid, Rigid-Soft, Soft-Rigid according to the interaction surface between grippers and target objects. We find experimental evidence that the interaction types between grippers and target objects play an essential role in the learning methods. We use soft, stuffed toys for training, instead of everyday objects, to reduce the integration complexity and computational burden and exploit such rigid-soft interaction by changing the gripper fingers to the soft ones when dealing with rigid, daily-life items such as the Yale-CMU-Berkeley (YCB) objects. With a small data collection of 5K picking attempts in total, our results suggest that such Rigid-Soft and Soft-Rigid interactions are transferable. Moreover, the combination of different grasp types shows better performance on the grasping test. We achieve the best grasping performance at 97.5\% for easy YCB objects and 81.3\% for difficult YCB objects while using a precise grasp with a two-soft-finger gripper to collect training data and power grasp with a four-soft-finger gripper to test.

Ziming Liu, Xiaobo Liu

The traditional PCA fault detection methods completely depend on the training data. The prior knowledge such as the physical principle of the system has not been taken into account. In this paper, we propose a new multi-PCA fault detection model combined with prior knowledge. This new model can adapt to the variable operating conditions of the central air conditioning system, and it can detect small deviation faults of sensors and significantly shorten the time delay of detecting drift faults. We also conducted enough ablation experiments to demonstrate that our model is more robust and efficient.

Yaoming Cai, Xiaobo Liu, Zhihua Cai

Hyperspectral image (HSI) consists of hundreds of continuous narrow bands with high spectral correlation, which would lead to the so-called Hughes phenomenon and the high computational cost in processing. Band selection has been proven effective in avoiding such problems by removing the redundant bands. However, many of existing band selection methods separately estimate the significance for every single band and cannot fully consider the nonlinear and global interaction between spectral bands. In this paper, by assuming that a complete HSI can be reconstructed from its few informative bands, we propose a general band selection framework, Band Selection Network (termed as BS-Net). The framework consists of a band attention module (BAM), which aims to explicitly model the nonlinear inter-dependencies between spectral bands, and a reconstruction network (RecNet), which is used to restore the original HSI cube from the learned informative bands, resulting in a flexible architecture. The resulting framework is end-to-end trainable, making it easier to train from scratch and to combine with existing networks. We implement two BS-Nets respectively using fully connected networks (BS-Net-FC) and convolutional neural networks (BS-Net-Conv), and compare the results with many existing band selection approaches for three real hyperspectral images, demonstrating that the proposed BS-Nets can accurately select informative band subset with less redundancy and achieve significantly better classification performance with an acceptable time cost.