Shuo Gu

Wei Xie, Haobo Jiang, Shuo Gu et al.

Robust obstacle avoidance is one of the critical steps for successful goal-driven indoor navigation tasks.Due to the obstacle missing in the visual image and the possible missed detection issue, visual image-based obstacle avoidance techniques still suffer from unsatisfactory robustness. To mitigate it, in this paper, we propose a novel implicit obstacle map-driven indoor navigation framework for robust obstacle avoidance, where an implicit obstacle map is learned based on the historical trial-and-error experience rather than the visual image. In order to further improve the navigation efficiency, a non-local target memory aggregation module is designed to leverage a non-local network to model the intrinsic relationship between the target semantic and the target orientation clues during the navigation process so as to mine the most target-correlated object clues for the navigation decision. Extensive experimental results on AI2-Thor and RoboTHOR benchmarks verify the excellent obstacle avoidance and navigation efficiency of our proposed method. The core source code is available at https://github.com/xwaiyy123/object-navigation.

Hamid Eghbalzadeh, Yang Wang, Rui Li et al.

Industrial ads ranking systems conventionally rely on labeled impression data, which leads to challenges such as overfitting, slower incremental gain from model scaling, and biases due to discrepancies between training and serving data. To overcome these issues, we propose a Unified framework for Knowledge-Distillation and Semi-supervised Learning (UKDSL) for ads ranking, empowering the training of models on a significantly larger and more diverse datasets, thereby reducing overfitting and mitigating training-serving data discrepancies. We provide detailed formal analysis and numerical simulations on the inherent miscalibration and prediction bias of multi-stage ranking systems, and show empirical evidence of the proposed framework's capability to mitigate those. Compared to prior work, UKDSL can enable models to learn from a much larger set of unlabeled data, hence, improving the performance while being computationally efficient. Finally, we report the successful deployment of UKDSL in an industrial setting across various ranking models, serving users at multi-billion scale, across various surfaces, geological locations, clients, and optimize for various events, which to the best of our knowledge is the first of its kind in terms of the scale and efficiency at which it operates.

Shih Chung B. Lo, Matthew T. Freedman, Seong K. Mun et al.

Mathematically speaking, a transformationally invariant operator, such as a transformationally identical (TI) matrix kernel (i.e., K= T{K}), commutes with the transformation (T{.}) itself when they operate on the first operand matrix. We found that by consistently applying the same type of TI kernels in a convolutional neural networks (CNN) system, the commutative property holds throughout all layers of convolution processes with and without involving an activation function and/or a 1D convolution across channels within a layer. We further found that any CNN possessing the same TI kernel property for all convolution layers followed by a flatten layer with weight sharing among their transformation corresponding elements would output the same result for all transformation versions of the original input vector. In short, CNN[ Vi ] = CNN[ T{Vi} ] providing every K = T{K} in CNN, where Vi denotes input vector and CNN[.] represents the whole CNN process as a function of input vector that produces an output vector. With such a transformationally identical CNN (TI-CNN) system, each transformation, that is not associated with a predefined TI used in data augmentation, would inherently include all of its corresponding transformation versions of the input vector for the training. Hence the use of same TI property for every kernel in the CNN would serve as an orientation or a translation independent training guide in conjunction with the error-backpropagation during the training. This TI kernel property is desirable for applications requiring a highly consistent output result from corresponding transformation versions of an input. Several C programming routines are provided to facilitate interested parties of using the TI-CNN technique which is expected to produce a better generalization performance than its ordinary CNN counterpart.