Abhishek Kaushik

George Eskandar, Chongzhe Zhang, Abhishek Kaushik et al.

3D Object Detectors (3D-OD) are crucial for understanding the environment in many robotic tasks, especially autonomous driving. Including 3D information via Lidar sensors improves accuracy greatly. However, such detectors perform poorly on domains they were not trained on, i.e. different locations, sensors, weather, etc., limiting their reliability in safety-critical applications. There exist methods to adapt 3D-ODs to these domains; however, these methods treat 3D-ODs as a black box, neglecting underlying architectural decisions and source-domain training strategies. Instead, we dive deep into the details of 3D-ODs, focusing our efforts on fundamental factors that influence robustness prior to domain adaptation. We systematically investigate four design choices (and the interplay between them) often overlooked in 3D-OD robustness and domain adaptation: architecture, voxel encoding, data augmentations, and anchor strategies. We assess their impact on the robustness of nine state-of-the-art 3D-ODs across six benchmarks encompassing three types of domain gaps - sensor type, weather, and location. Our main findings are: (1) transformer backbones with local point features are more robust than 3D CNNs, (2) test-time anchor size adjustment is crucial for adaptation across geographical locations, significantly boosting scores without retraining, (3) source-domain augmentations allow the model to generalize to low-resolution sensors, and (4) surprisingly, robustness to bad weather is improved when training directly on more clean weather data than on training with bad weather data. We outline our main conclusions and findings to provide practical guidance on developing more robust 3D-ODs.

Abhishek Kaushik, Norbert Haala, Uwe Soergel

Addressing performance degradation in 3D LiDAR semantic segmentation due to domain shifts (e.g., sensor type, geographical location) is crucial for autonomous systems, yet manual annotation of target data is prohibitive. This study addresses the challenge using Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) and introduces a novel two-stage framework to tackle it. Initially, unsupervised contrastive learning at the segment level is used to pre-train a backbone network, enabling it to learn robust, domain-invariant features without labels. Subsequently, a multi-model pseudo-labeling strategy is introduced, utilizing an ensemble of diverse state-of-the-art architectures (including projection, voxel, hybrid, and cylinder-based methods). Predictions from these models are aggregated via hard voting to generate high-quality, refined pseudo-labels for the unlabeled target domain, mitigating single-model biases. The contrastively pre-trained network is then fine-tuned using these robust pseudo-labels. Experiments adapting from SemanticKITTI to unlabeled target datasets (SemanticPOSS, SemanticSlamantic) demonstrate significant improvements in segmentation accuracy compared to direct transfer and single-model UDA approaches. These results highlight the effectiveness of combining contrastive pre-training with refined ensemble pseudo-labeling for bridging complex domain gaps without requiring target domain annotations.

Abhishek Kaushik, Kayla Rush

Music is a potent form of expression that can communicate, accentuate or even create the emotions of an individual or a collective. Both historically and in contemporary experiences, musical expression was and is commonly instrumentalized for social, political and/or economic purposes. Generative artificial intelligence provides a wealth of both opportunities and challenges with regard to music and its role in society. This paper discusses a proposed project integrating artificial intelligence and popular music, with the ultimate goal of creating a powerful tool for implementing music for social transformation, education, healthcare, and emotional well-being. Given that it is being presented at the outset of a collaboration between a computer scientist/data analyst and an ethnomusicologist/social anthropologist. it is mainly conceptual and somewhat speculative in nature.

Abhishek Kaushik, Gareth J. F. Jones

Conversational search presents opportunities to support users in their search activities to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of search while reducing their cognitive load. Limitations of the potential competency of conversational agents restrict the situations for which conversational search agents can replace human intermediaries. It is thus more interesting, initially at least, to investigate opportunities for conversational interaction to support less complex information retrieval tasks, such as typical web search, which do not require human-level intelligence in the conversational agent. In order to move towards the development of a system to enable conversational search of this type, we need to understand their required capabilities. To progress our understanding of these, we report a study examining the behaviour of users when using a standard web search engine, designed to enable us to identify opportunities to support their search activities using a conversational agent.