CVMar 20
Cov2Pose: Leveraging Spatial Covariance for Direct Manifold-aware 6-DoF Object Pose EstimationNassim Ali Ousalah, Peyman Rostami, Vincent Gaudillière et al.
In this paper, we address the problem of 6-DoF object pose estimation from a single RGB image. Indirect methods that typically predict intermediate 2D keypoints, followed by a Perspective-n-Point solver, have shown great performance. Direct approaches, which regress the pose in an end-to-end manner, are usually computationally more efficient but less accurate. However, direct heads rely on globally pooled features, ignoring spatial second-order statistics despite their informativeness in pose prediction. They also predict, in most cases, discontinuous pose representations that lack robustness. Herein, we therefore propose a covariance-pooled representation that encodes convolutional feature distributions as a symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrix. Moreover, we propose a novel pose encoding in the form of an SPD matrix via its Cholesky decomposition. Pose is then regressed in an end-to-end manner with a manifold-aware network head, taking into account the Riemannian geometry of SPD matrices. Experiments and ablations consistently demonstrate the relevance of second-order pooling and continuous representations for direct pose regression, including under partial occlusion.
LGJul 19, 2023
Impact of Disentanglement on Pruning Neural NetworksCarl Shneider, Peyman Rostami, Anis Kacem et al.
Deploying deep learning neural networks on edge devices, to accomplish task specific objectives in the real-world, requires a reduction in their memory footprint, power consumption, and latency. This can be realized via efficient model compression. Disentangled latent representations produced by variational autoencoder (VAE) networks are a promising approach for achieving model compression because they mainly retain task-specific information, discarding useless information for the task at hand. We make use of the Beta-VAE framework combined with a standard criterion for pruning to investigate the impact of forcing the network to learn disentangled representations on the pruning process for the task of classification. In particular, we perform experiments on MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets, examine disentanglement challenges, and propose a path forward for future works.
LGApr 15, 2024
Multi-Objective Hardware Aware Neural Architecture Search using Hardware Cost DiversityNilotpal Sinha, Peyman Rostami, Abd El Rahman Shabayek et al.
Hardware-aware Neural Architecture Search approaches (HW-NAS) automate the design of deep learning architectures, tailored specifically to a given target hardware platform. Yet, these techniques demand substantial computational resources, primarily due to the expensive process of assessing the performance of identified architectures. To alleviate this problem, a recent direction in the literature has employed representation similarity metric for efficiently evaluating architecture performance. Nonetheless, since it is inherently a single objective method, it requires multiple runs to identify the optimal architecture set satisfying the diverse hardware cost constraints, thereby increasing the search cost. Furthermore, simply converting the single objective into a multi-objective approach results in an under-explored architectural search space. In this study, we propose a Multi-Objective method to address the HW-NAS problem, called MO-HDNAS, to identify the trade-off set of architectures in a single run with low computational cost. This is achieved by optimizing three objectives: maximizing the representation similarity metric, minimizing hardware cost, and maximizing the hardware cost diversity. The third objective, i.e. hardware cost diversity, is used to facilitate a better exploration of the architecture search space. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in efficiently addressing the HW-NAS problem across six edge devices for the image classification task.
CVAug 5, 2025
FPG-NAS: FLOPs-Aware Gated Differentiable Neural Architecture Search for Efficient 6DoF Pose EstimationNassim Ali Ousalah, Peyman Rostami, Anis Kacem et al.
We introduce FPG-NAS, a FLOPs-aware Gated Differentiable Neural Architecture Search framework for efficient 6DoF object pose estimation. Estimating 3D rotation and translation from a single image has been widely investigated yet remains computationally demanding, limiting applicability in resource-constrained scenarios. FPG-NAS addresses this by proposing a specialized differentiable NAS approach for 6DoF pose estimation, featuring a task-specific search space and a differentiable gating mechanism that enables discrete multi-candidate operator selection, thus improving architectural diversity. Additionally, a FLOPs regularization term ensures a balanced trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. The framework explores a vast search space of approximately 10\textsuperscript{92} possible architectures. Experiments on the LINEMOD and SPEED+ datasets demonstrate that FPG-NAS-derived models outperform previous methods under strict FLOPs constraints. To the best of our knowledge, FPG-NAS is the first differentiable NAS framework specifically designed for 6DoF object pose estimation.
CLJun 9, 2025
PolitiSky24: U.S. Political Bluesky Dataset with User Stance LabelsPeyman Rostami, Vahid Rahimzadeh, Ali Adibi et al.
Stance detection identifies the viewpoint expressed in text toward a specific target, such as a political figure. While previous datasets have focused primarily on tweet-level stances from established platforms, user-level stance resources, especially on emerging platforms like Bluesky remain scarce. User-level stance detection provides a more holistic view by considering a user's complete posting history rather than isolated posts. We present the first stance detection dataset for the 2024 U.S. presidential election, collected from Bluesky and centered on Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The dataset comprises 16,044 user-target stance pairs enriched with engagement metadata, interaction graphs, and user posting histories. PolitiSky24 was created using a carefully evaluated pipeline combining advanced information retrieval and large language models, which generates stance labels with supporting rationales and text spans for transparency. The labeling approach achieves 81\% accuracy with scalable LLMs. This resource addresses gaps in political stance analysis through its timeliness, open-data nature, and user-level perspective. The dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15616911