ROOct 30, 2025
Alpamayo-R1: Bridging Reasoning and Action Prediction for Generalizable Autonomous Driving in the Long TailYan Wang, Wenjie Luo, Junjie Bai et al. · nvidia
End-to-end architectures trained via imitation learning have advanced autonomous driving by scaling model size and data, yet performance remains brittle in safety-critical long-tail scenarios where supervision is sparse and causal understanding is limited. To address this, we introduce Alpamayo-R1 (AR1), a vision-language-action model (VLA) that integrates Chain of Causation reasoning with trajectory planning to enhance decision-making in complex driving scenarios. Our approach features three key innovations: (1) the Chain of Causation (CoC) dataset, built through a hybrid auto-labeling and human-in-the-loop pipeline producing decision-grounded, causally linked reasoning traces aligned with driving behaviors; (2) a modular VLA architecture combining Cosmos-Reason, a Vision-Language Model pre-trained for Physical AI applications, with a diffusion-based trajectory decoder that generates dynamically feasible plans in real time; (3) a multi-stage training strategy using supervised fine-tuning to elicit reasoning and reinforcement learning (RL) to optimize reasoning quality via large reasoning model feedback and enforce reasoning-action consistency. Evaluation shows AR1 achieves up to a 12% improvement in planning accuracy on challenging cases compared to a trajectory-only baseline, with a 35% reduction in off-road rate and 25% reduction in close encounter rate in closed-loop simulation. RL post-training improves reasoning quality by 45% as measured by a large reasoning model critic and reasoning-action consistency by 37%. Model scaling from 0.5B to 7B parameters shows consistent improvements. On-vehicle road tests confirm real-time performance (99 ms latency) and successful urban deployment. By bridging interpretable reasoning with precise control, AR1 demonstrates a practical path towards Level 4 autonomous driving. We plan to release AR1 models and a subset of the CoC in a future update.
AIMar 18, 2025Code
Cosmos-Reason1: From Physical Common Sense To Embodied ReasoningAlisson Azzolini, Junjie Bai, Hannah Brandon et al. · nvidia
Physical AI systems need to perceive, understand, and perform complex actions in the physical world. In this paper, we present the Cosmos-Reason1 models that can understand the physical world and generate appropriate embodied decisions (e.g., next step action) in natural language through long chain-of-thought reasoning processes. We begin by defining key capabilities for Physical AI reasoning, with a focus on physical common sense and embodied reasoning. To represent physical common sense, we use a hierarchical ontology that captures fundamental knowledge about space, time, and physics. For embodied reasoning, we rely on a two-dimensional ontology that generalizes across different physical embodiments. Building on these capabilities, we develop two multimodal large language models, Cosmos-Reason1-7B and Cosmos-Reason1-56B. We curate data and train our models in two stages: Physical AI supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Physical AI reinforcement learning (RL). To evaluate our models, we build comprehensive benchmarks for physical common sense and embodied reasoning according to our ontologies. Evaluation results show that Physical AI SFT and RL bring significant improvements. To facilitate the development of Physical AI, we make our code and pre-trained models available under the NVIDIA Open Model License at https://github.com/nvidia-cosmos/cosmos-reason1.
CVMar 18, 2025Code
Cosmos-Transfer1: Conditional World Generation with Adaptive Multimodal ControlHassan Abu Alhaija, Jose Alvarez, Maciej Bala et al. · nvidia
We introduce Cosmos-Transfer, a conditional world generation model that can generate world simulations based on multiple spatial control inputs of various modalities such as segmentation, depth, and edge. In the design, the spatial conditional scheme is adaptive and customizable. It allows weighting different conditional inputs differently at different spatial locations. This enables highly controllable world generation and finds use in various world-to-world transfer use cases, including Sim2Real. We conduct extensive evaluations to analyze the proposed model and demonstrate its applications for Physical AI, including robotics Sim2Real and autonomous vehicle data enrichment. We further demonstrate an inference scaling strategy to achieve real-time world generation with an NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 rack. To help accelerate research development in the field, we open-source our models and code at https://github.com/nvidia-cosmos/cosmos-transfer1.
CVOct 28, 2025Code
World Simulation with Video Foundation Models for Physical AIArslan Ali, Junjie Bai, Maciej Bala et al. · nvidia
We introduce [Cosmos-Predict2.5], the latest generation of the Cosmos World Foundation Models for Physical AI. Built on a flow-based architecture, [Cosmos-Predict2.5] unifies Text2World, Image2World, and Video2World generation in a single model and leverages [Cosmos-Reason1], a Physical AI vision-language model, to provide richer text grounding and finer control of world simulation. Trained on 200M curated video clips and refined with reinforcement learning-based post-training, [Cosmos-Predict2.5] achieves substantial improvements over [Cosmos-Predict1] in video quality and instruction alignment, with models released at 2B and 14B scales. These capabilities enable more reliable synthetic data generation, policy evaluation, and closed-loop simulation for robotics and autonomous systems. We further extend the family with [Cosmos-Transfer2.5], a control-net style framework for Sim2Real and Real2Real world translation. Despite being 3.5$\times$ smaller than [Cosmos-Transfer1], it delivers higher fidelity and robust long-horizon video generation. Together, these advances establish [Cosmos-Predict2.5] and [Cosmos-Transfer2.5] as versatile tools for scaling embodied intelligence. To accelerate research and deployment in Physical AI, we release source code, pretrained checkpoints, and curated benchmarks under the NVIDIA Open Model License at https://github.com/nvidia-cosmos/cosmos-predict2.5 and https://github.com/nvidia-cosmos/cosmos-transfer2.5. We hope these open resources lower the barrier to adoption and foster innovation in building the next generation of embodied intelligence.
99.9CVJun 1Code
Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AIAditi, Niket Agarwal, Arslan Ali et al.
We introduce Cosmos 3, a family of omnimodal world models designed to jointly process and generate language, image, video, audio, and action sequences within a unified mixture-of-transformers architecture. By supporting highly flexible input-output configurations, Cosmos 3 seamlessly unifies critical modalities for Physical AI -- effectively subsuming vision-language models, video generators, world simulators, and world-action models into a single framework. Our evaluation demonstrates that Cosmos 3 establishes a new state-of-the-art across a diverse suite of understanding and generation tasks, demonstrating omnimodal world models as scalable, general-purpose backbones for embodied agents. Our post-trained Cosmos 3 models were ranked as the best open-source Text-to-Image and Image-to-Video models by Artificial Analysis, and the best policy model by RoboArena at the time the technical report was written. To accelerate open research and deployment in Physical AI, we make our code, model checkpoints, curated synthetic datasets, and evaluation benchmark available under the Linux Foundation's OpenMDW-1.1 https://openmdw.ai/license/1-1/ License at https://github.com/nvidia/cosmos}{github.com/nvidia/cosmos and https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/cosmos3 . The project website is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3 .
CVSep 26, 2023
DistillBEV: Boosting Multi-Camera 3D Object Detection with Cross-Modal Knowledge DistillationZeyu Wang, Dingwen Li, Chenxu Luo et al.
3D perception based on the representations learned from multi-camera bird's-eye-view (BEV) is trending as cameras are cost-effective for mass production in autonomous driving industry. However, there exists a distinct performance gap between multi-camera BEV and LiDAR based 3D object detection. One key reason is that LiDAR captures accurate depth and other geometry measurements, while it is notoriously challenging to infer such 3D information from merely image input. In this work, we propose to boost the representation learning of a multi-camera BEV based student detector by training it to imitate the features of a well-trained LiDAR based teacher detector. We propose effective balancing strategy to enforce the student to focus on learning the crucial features from the teacher, and generalize knowledge transfer to multi-scale layers with temporal fusion. We conduct extensive evaluations on multiple representative models of multi-camera BEV. Experiments reveal that our approach renders significant improvement over the student models, leading to the state-of-the-art performance on the popular benchmark nuScenes.
LGJun 27, 2022
Normalized/Clipped SGD with Perturbation for Differentially Private Non-Convex OptimizationXiaodong Yang, Huishuai Zhang, Wei Chen et al.
By ensuring differential privacy in the learning algorithms, one can rigorously mitigate the risk of large models memorizing sensitive training data. In this paper, we study two algorithms for this purpose, i.e., DP-SGD and DP-NSGD, which first clip or normalize \textit{per-sample} gradients to bound the sensitivity and then add noise to obfuscate the exact information. We analyze the convergence behavior of these two algorithms in the non-convex optimization setting with two common assumptions and achieve a rate $\mathcal{O}\left(\sqrt[4]{\frac{d\log(1/δ)}{N^2ε^2}}\right)$ of the gradient norm for a $d$-dimensional model, $N$ samples and $(ε,δ)$-DP, which improves over previous bounds under much weaker assumptions. Specifically, we introduce a regularizing factor in DP-NSGD and show that it is crucial in the convergence proof and subtly controls the bias and noise trade-off. Our proof deliberately handles the per-sample gradient clipping and normalization that are specified for the private setting. Empirically, we demonstrate that these two algorithms achieve similar best accuracy while DP-NSGD is comparatively easier to tune than DP-SGD and hence may help further save the privacy budget when accounting the tuning effort.
CVNov 14, 2022
SportsTrack: An Innovative Method for Tracking Athletes in Sports ScenesJie Wang, Yuzhou Peng, Xiaodong Yang et al.
The SportsMOT dataset aims to solve multiple object tracking of athletes in different sports scenes such as basketball or soccer. The dataset is challenging because of the unstable camera view, athletes' complex trajectory, and complicated background. Previous MOT methods can not match enough high-quality tracks of athletes. To pursue higher performance of MOT in sports scenes, we introduce an innovative tracker named SportsTrack, we utilize tracking by detection as our detection paradigm. Then we will introduce a three-stage matching process to solve the motion blur and body overlapping in sports scenes. Meanwhile, we present another innovation point: one-to-many correspondence between detection bboxes and crowded tracks to handle the overlap of athletes' bodies during sports competitions. Compared to other trackers such as BOT-SORT and ByteTrack, We carefully restored edge-lost tracks that were ignored by other trackers. Finally, we reached the SOTA result in the SportsMOT dataset.
CVMar 21, 2023
ProphNet: Efficient Agent-Centric Motion Forecasting with Anchor-Informed ProposalsXishun Wang, Tong Su, Fang Da et al.
Motion forecasting is a key module in an autonomous driving system. Due to the heterogeneous nature of multi-sourced input, multimodality in agent behavior, and low latency required by onboard deployment, this task is notoriously challenging. To cope with these difficulties, this paper proposes a novel agent-centric model with anchor-informed proposals for efficient multimodal motion prediction. We design a modality-agnostic strategy to concisely encode the complex input in a unified manner. We generate diverse proposals, fused with anchors bearing goal-oriented scene context, to induce multimodal prediction that covers a wide range of future trajectories. Our network architecture is highly uniform and succinct, leading to an efficient model amenable for real-world driving deployment. Experiments reveal that our agent-centric network compares favorably with the state-of-the-art methods in prediction accuracy, while achieving scene-centric level inference latency.
CVMar 28, 2022
TL-GAN: Improving Traffic Light Recognition via Data Synthesis for Autonomous DrivingDanfeng Wang, Xin Ma, Xiaodong Yang
Traffic light recognition, as a critical component of the perception module of self-driving vehicles, plays a vital role in the intelligent transportation systems. The prevalent deep learning based traffic light recognition methods heavily hinge on the large quantity and rich diversity of training data. However, it is quite challenging to collect data in various rare scenarios such as flashing, blackout or extreme weather, thus resulting in the imbalanced distribution of training data and consequently the degraded performance in recognizing rare classes. In this paper, we seek to improve traffic light recognition by leveraging data synthesis. Inspired by the generative adversarial networks (GANs), we propose a novel traffic light generation approach TL-GAN to synthesize the data of rare classes to improve traffic light recognition for autonomous driving. TL-GAN disentangles traffic light sequence generation into image synthesis and sequence assembling. In the image synthesis stage, our approach enables conditional generation to allow full control of the color of the generated traffic light images. In the sequence assembling stage, we design the style mixing and adaptive template to synthesize realistic and diverse traffic light sequences. Extensive experiments show that the proposed TL-GAN renders remarkable improvement over the baseline without using the generated data, leading to the state-of-the-art performance in comparison with the competing algorithms that are used for general image synthesis and data imbalance tackling.
59.1CVApr 11Code
A3-FPN: Asymptotic Content-Aware Pyramid Attention Network for Dense Visual PredictionMeng'en Qin, Yu Song, Quanling Zhao et al.
Learning multi-scale representations is the common strategy to tackle object scale variation in dense prediction tasks. Although existing feature pyramid networks have greatly advanced visual recognition, inherent design defects inhibit them from capturing discriminative features and recognizing small objects. In this work, we propose Asymptotic Content-Aware Pyramid Attention Network (A3-FPN), to augment multi-scale feature representation via the asymptotically disentangled framework and content-aware attention modules. Specifically, A3-FPN employs a horizontally-spread column network that enables asymptotically global feature interaction and disentangles each level from all hierarchical representations. In feature fusion, it collects supplementary content from the adjacent level to generate position-wise offsets and weights for context-aware resampling, and learns deep context reweights to improve intra-category similarity. In feature reassembly, it further strengthens intra-scale discriminative feature learning and reassembles redundant features based on information content and spatial variation of feature maps. Extensive experiments on MS COCO, VisDrone2019-DET and Cityscapes demonstrate that A3-FPN can be easily integrated into state-of-the-art CNN and Transformer-based architectures, yielding remarkable performance gains. Notably, when paired with OneFormer and Swin-L backbone, A3-FPN achieves 49.6 mask AP on MS COCO and 85.6 mIoU on Cityscapes. Codes are available at https://github.com/mason-ching/A3-FPN.
CVJun 12, 2023
Transcendental Idealism of Planner: Evaluating Perception from Planning Perspective for Autonomous DrivingWei-Xin Li, Xiaodong Yang
Evaluating the performance of perception modules in autonomous driving is one of the most critical tasks in developing the complex intelligent system. While module-level unit test metrics adopted from traditional computer vision tasks are feasible to some extent, it remains far less explored to measure the impact of perceptual noise on the driving quality of autonomous vehicles in a consistent and holistic manner. In this work, we propose a principled framework that provides a coherent and systematic understanding of the impact an error in the perception module imposes on an autonomous agent's planning that actually controls the vehicle. Specifically, the planning process is formulated as expected utility maximisation, where all input signals from upstream modules jointly provide a world state description, and the planner strives for the optimal action by maximising the expected utility determined by both world states and actions. We show that, under practical conditions, the objective function can be represented as an inner product between the world state description and the utility function in a Hilbert space. This geometric interpretation enables a novel way to analyse the impact of noise in world state estimation on planning and leads to a universal metric for evaluating perception. The whole framework resembles the idea of transcendental idealism in the classical philosophical literature, which gives the name to our approach.
CVSep 10, 2024
Cross-Modal Self-Supervised Learning with Effective Contrastive Units for LiDAR Point CloudsMu Cai, Chenxu Luo, Yong Jae Lee et al.
3D perception in LiDAR point clouds is crucial for a self-driving vehicle to properly act in 3D environment. However, manually labeling point clouds is hard and costly. There has been a growing interest in self-supervised pre-training of 3D perception models. Following the success of contrastive learning in images, current methods mostly conduct contrastive pre-training on point clouds only. Yet an autonomous driving vehicle is typically supplied with multiple sensors including cameras and LiDAR. In this context, we systematically study single modality, cross-modality, and multi-modality for contrastive learning of point clouds, and show that cross-modality wins over other alternatives. In addition, considering the huge difference between the training sources in 2D images and 3D point clouds, it remains unclear how to design more effective contrastive units for LiDAR. We therefore propose the instance-aware and similarity-balanced contrastive units that are tailored for self-driving point clouds. Extensive experiments reveal that our approach achieves remarkable performance gains over various point cloud models across the downstream perception tasks of LiDAR based 3D object detection and 3D semantic segmentation on the four popular benchmarks including Waymo Open Dataset, nuScenes, SemanticKITTI and ONCE.
CVSep 18, 2023
GEDepth: Ground Embedding for Monocular Depth EstimationXiaodong Yang, Zhuang Ma, Zhiyu Ji et al.
Monocular depth estimation is an ill-posed problem as the same 2D image can be projected from infinite 3D scenes. Although the leading algorithms in this field have reported significant improvement, they are essentially geared to the particular compound of pictorial observations and camera parameters (i.e., intrinsics and extrinsics), strongly limiting their generalizability in real-world scenarios. To cope with this challenge, this paper proposes a novel ground embedding module to decouple camera parameters from pictorial cues, thus promoting the generalization capability. Given camera parameters, the proposed module generates the ground depth, which is stacked with the input image and referenced in the final depth prediction. A ground attention is designed in the module to optimally combine ground depth with residual depth. Our ground embedding is highly flexible and lightweight, leading to a plug-in module that is amenable to be integrated into various depth estimation networks. Experiments reveal that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art results on popular benchmarks, and more importantly, renders significant generalization improvement on a wide range of cross-domain tests.
CVJul 13, 2022
QML for Argoverse 2 Motion Forecasting ChallengeTong Su, Xishun Wang, Xiaodong Yang
To safely navigate in various complex traffic scenarios, autonomous driving systems are generally equipped with a motion forecasting module to provide vital information for the downstream planning module. For the real-world onboard applications, both accuracy and latency of a motion forecasting model are essential. In this report, we present an effective and efficient solution, which ranks the 3rd place in the Argoverse 2 Motion Forecasting Challenge 2022.
83.5CVMar 18
VLM-AutoDrive: Post-Training Vision-Language Models for Safety-Critical Autonomous Driving EventsMohammad Qazim Bhat, Yufan Huang, Niket Agarwal et al.
The rapid growth of ego-centric dashcam footage presents a major challenge for detecting safety-critical events such as collisions and near-collisions, scenarios that are brief, rare, and difficult for generic vision models to capture. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong general reasoning ability, they underperform in driving contexts due to domain and temporal misalignment. We introduce VLM-AutoDrive, a modular post-training framework for adapting pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to high-fidelity anomaly detection. The framework integrates metadata-derived captions, LLM-generated descriptions, visual question answering (VQA) pairs, and chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning supervision to enable domain-aligned and interpretable learning. Off-the-shelf VLMs such as NVIDIA's Cosmos-Reason1 7B (CR1) exhibit near-zero Collision recall in zero-shot settings; fine-tuning with VLM-AutoDrive improves Collision F1 from 0.00 to 0.69 and overall accuracy from 35.35% to 77.27%. VLM-AutoDrive offers a scalable recipe for adapting general-purpose VLMs to safety-critical, temporally localized perception tasks. Evaluated on real-world Nexar dashcam videos, it achieves substantial gains in Collision and Near-Collision detection while producing interpretable reasoning traces, bridging the gap between perception, causality, and decision reasoning in autonomous driving.
LGAug 20, 2024
GAIM: Attacking Graph Neural Networks via Adversarial Influence MaximizationXiaodong Yang, Xiaoting Li, Huiyuan Chen et al.
Recent studies show that well-devised perturbations on graph structures or node features can mislead trained Graph Neural Network (GNN) models. However, these methods often overlook practical assumptions, over-rely on heuristics, or separate vital attack components. In response, we present GAIM, an integrated adversarial attack method conducted on a node feature basis while considering the strict black-box setting. Specifically, we define an adversarial influence function to theoretically assess the adversarial impact of node perturbations, thereby reframing the GNN attack problem into the adversarial influence maximization problem. In our approach, we unify the selection of the target node and the construction of feature perturbations into a single optimization problem, ensuring a unique and consistent feature perturbation for each target node. We leverage a surrogate model to transform this problem into a solvable linear programming task, streamlining the optimization process. Moreover, we extend our method to accommodate label-oriented attacks, broadening its applicability. Thorough evaluations on five benchmark datasets across three popular models underscore the effectiveness of our method in both untargeted and label-oriented targeted attacks. Through comprehensive analysis and ablation studies, we demonstrate the practical value and efficacy inherent to our design choices.
LGOct 26, 2023
Benign Oscillation of Stochastic Gradient Descent with Large Learning RatesMiao Lu, Beining Wu, Xiaodong Yang et al.
In this work, we theoretically investigate the generalization properties of neural networks (NN) trained by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm with large learning rates. Under such a training regime, our finding is that, the oscillation of the NN weights caused by the large learning rate SGD training turns out to be beneficial to the generalization of the NN, which potentially improves over the same NN trained by SGD with small learning rates that converges more smoothly. In view of this finding, we call such a phenomenon "benign oscillation". Our theory towards demystifying such a phenomenon builds upon the feature learning perspective of deep learning. Specifically, we consider a feature-noise data generation model that consists of (i) weak features which have a small $\ell_2$-norm and appear in each data point; (ii) strong features which have a larger $\ell_2$-norm but only appear in a certain fraction of all data points; and (iii) noise. We prove that NNs trained by oscillating SGD with a large learning rate can effectively learn the weak features in the presence of those strong features. In contrast, NNs trained by SGD with a small learning rate can only learn the strong features but makes little progress in learning the weak features. Consequently, when it comes to the new testing data which consist of only weak features, the NN trained by oscillating SGD with a large learning rate could still make correct predictions consistently, while the NN trained by small learning rate SGD fails. Our theory sheds light on how large learning rate training benefits the generalization of NNs. Experimental results demonstrate our finding on "benign oscillation".
CVMay 2, 2020Code
PAMTRI: Pose-Aware Multi-Task Learning for Vehicle Re-Identification Using Highly Randomized Synthetic DataZheng Tang, Milind Naphade, Stan Birchfield et al.
In comparison with person re-identification (ReID), which has been widely studied in the research community, vehicle ReID has received less attention. Vehicle ReID is challenging due to 1) high intra-class variability (caused by the dependency of shape and appearance on viewpoint), and 2) small inter-class variability (caused by the similarity in shape and appearance between vehicles produced by different manufacturers). To address these challenges, we propose a Pose-Aware Multi-Task Re-Identification (PAMTRI) framework. This approach includes two innovations compared with previous methods. First, it overcomes viewpoint-dependency by explicitly reasoning about vehicle pose and shape via keypoints, heatmaps and segments from pose estimation. Second, it jointly classifies semantic vehicle attributes (colors and types) while performing ReID, through multi-task learning with the embedded pose representations. Since manually labeling images with detailed pose and attribute information is prohibitive, we create a large-scale highly randomized synthetic dataset with automatically annotated vehicle attributes for training. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of each proposed component, showing that PAMTRI achieves significant improvement over state-of-the-art on two mainstream vehicle ReID benchmarks: VeRi and CityFlow-ReID. Code and models are available at https://github.com/NVlabs/PAMTRI.
CVApr 9, 2020Code
Instance-aware, Context-focused, and Memory-efficient Weakly Supervised Object DetectionZhongzheng Ren, Zhiding Yu, Xiaodong Yang et al.
Weakly supervised learning has emerged as a compelling tool for object detection by reducing the need for strong supervision during training. However, major challenges remain: (1) differentiation of object instances can be ambiguous; (2) detectors tend to focus on discriminative parts rather than entire objects; (3) without ground truth, object proposals have to be redundant for high recalls, causing significant memory consumption. Addressing these challenges is difficult, as it often requires to eliminate uncertainties and trivial solutions. To target these issues we develop an instance-aware and context-focused unified framework. It employs an instance-aware self-training algorithm and a learnable Concrete DropBlock while devising a memory-efficient sequential batch back-propagation. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on COCO ($12.1\% ~AP$, $24.8\% ~AP_{50}$), VOC 2007 ($54.9\% ~AP$), and VOC 2012 ($52.1\% ~AP$), improving baselines by great margins. In addition, the proposed method is the first to benchmark ResNet based models and weakly supervised video object detection. Code, models, and more details will be made available at: https://github.com/NVlabs/wetectron.
CVDec 18, 2019Code
Simulating Content Consistent Vehicle Datasets with Attribute DescentYue Yao, Liang Zheng, Xiaodong Yang et al.
This paper uses a graphic engine to simulate a large amount of training data with free annotations. Between synthetic and real data, there is a two-level domain gap, i.e., content level and appearance level. While the latter has been widely studied, we focus on reducing the content gap in attributes like illumination and viewpoint. To reduce the problem complexity, we choose a smaller and more controllable application, vehicle re-identification (re-ID). We introduce a large-scale synthetic dataset VehicleX. Created in Unity, it contains 1,362 vehicles of various 3D models with fully editable attributes. We propose an attribute descent approach to let VehicleX approximate the attributes in real-world datasets. Specifically, we manipulate each attribute in VehicleX, aiming to minimize the discrepancy between VehicleX and real data in terms of the Fréchet Inception Distance (FID). This attribute descent algorithm allows content domain adaptation (DA) orthogonal to existing appearance DA methods. We mix the optimized VehicleX data with real-world vehicle re-ID datasets, and observe consistent improvement. With the augmented datasets, we report competitive accuracy. We make the dataset, engine and our codes available at https://github.com/yorkeyao/VehicleX.
CVSep 14, 2018Code
Models Matter, So Does Training: An Empirical Study of CNNs for Optical Flow EstimationDeqing Sun, Xiaodong Yang, Ming-Yu Liu et al.
We investigate two crucial and closely related aspects of CNNs for optical flow estimation: models and training. First, we design a compact but effective CNN model, called PWC-Net, according to simple and well-established principles: pyramidal processing, warping, and cost volume processing. PWC-Net is 17 times smaller in size, 2 times faster in inference, and 11\% more accurate on Sintel final than the recent FlowNet2 model. It is the winning entry in the optical flow competition of the robust vision challenge. Next, we experimentally analyze the sources of our performance gains. In particular, we use the same training procedure of PWC-Net to retrain FlowNetC, a sub-network of FlowNet2. The retrained FlowNetC is 56\% more accurate on Sintel final than the previously trained one and even 5\% more accurate than the FlowNet2 model. We further improve the training procedure and increase the accuracy of PWC-Net on Sintel by 10\% and on KITTI 2012 and 2015 by 20\%. Our newly trained model parameters and training protocols will be available on https://github.com/NVlabs/PWC-Net
CVSep 7, 2017Code
PWC-Net: CNNs for Optical Flow Using Pyramid, Warping, and Cost VolumeDeqing Sun, Xiaodong Yang, Ming-Yu Liu et al.
We present a compact but effective CNN model for optical flow, called PWC-Net. PWC-Net has been designed according to simple and well-established principles: pyramidal processing, warping, and the use of a cost volume. Cast in a learnable feature pyramid, PWC-Net uses the cur- rent optical flow estimate to warp the CNN features of the second image. It then uses the warped features and features of the first image to construct a cost volume, which is processed by a CNN to estimate the optical flow. PWC-Net is 17 times smaller in size and easier to train than the recent FlowNet2 model. Moreover, it outperforms all published optical flow methods on the MPI Sintel final pass and KITTI 2015 benchmarks, running at about 35 fps on Sintel resolution (1024x436) images. Our models are available on https://github.com/NVlabs/PWC-Net.
LGApr 20, 2025
Learning Critically: Selective Self Distillation in Federated Learning on Non-IID DataYuting He, Yiqiang Chen, XiaoDong Yang et al.
Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a global model while keeping local data decentralized. Data heterogeneity (non-IID) across clients has imposed significant challenges to FL, which makes local models re-optimize towards their own local optima and forget the global knowledge, resulting in performance degradation and convergence slowdown. Many existing works have attempted to address the non-IID issue by adding an extra global-model-based regularizing item to the local training but without an adaption scheme, which is not efficient enough to achieve high performance with deep learning models. In this paper, we propose a Selective Self-Distillation method for Federated learning (FedSSD), which imposes adaptive constraints on the local updates by self-distilling the global model's knowledge and selectively weighting it by evaluating the credibility at both the class and sample level. The convergence guarantee of FedSSD is theoretically analyzed and extensive experiments are conducted on three public benchmark datasets, which demonstrates that FedSSD achieves better generalization and robustness in fewer communication rounds, compared with other state-of-the-art FL methods.
LGJan 7, 2025
Enhancing Distribution and Label Consistency for Graph Out-of-Distribution GeneralizationSong Wang, Xiaodong Yang, Rashidul Islam et al.
To deal with distribution shifts in graph data, various graph out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization techniques have been recently proposed. These methods often employ a two-step strategy that first creates augmented environments and subsequently identifies invariant subgraphs to improve generalizability. Nevertheless, this approach could be suboptimal from the perspective of consistency. First, the process of augmenting environments by altering the graphs while preserving labels may lead to graphs that are not realistic or meaningfully related to the origin distribution, thus lacking distribution consistency. Second, the extracted subgraphs are obtained from directly modifying graphs, and may not necessarily maintain a consistent predictive relationship with their labels, thereby impacting label consistency. In response to these challenges, we introduce an innovative approach that aims to enhance these two types of consistency for graph OOD generalization. We propose a modifier to obtain both augmented and invariant graphs in a unified manner. With the augmented graphs, we enrich the training data without compromising the integrity of label-graph relationships. The label consistency enhancement in our framework further preserves the supervision information in the invariant graph. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets to demonstrate the superiority of our framework over other state-of-the-art baselines.
CVMay 27, 2025
MoPFormer: Motion-Primitive Transformer for Wearable-Sensor Activity RecognitionHao Zhang, Zhan Zhuang, Xuehao Wang et al.
Human Activity Recognition (HAR) with wearable sensors is challenged by limited interpretability, which significantly impacts cross-dataset generalization. To address this challenge, we propose Motion-Primitive Transformer (MoPFormer), a novel self-supervised framework that enhances interpretability by tokenizing inertial measurement unit signals into semantically meaningful motion primitives and leverages a Transformer architecture to learn rich temporal representations. MoPFormer comprises two stages. The first stage is to partition multi-channel sensor streams into short segments and quantize them into discrete ``motion primitive'' codewords, while the second stage enriches those tokenized sequences through a context-aware embedding module and then processes them with a Transformer encoder. The proposed MoPFormer can be pre-trained using a masked motion-modeling objective that reconstructs missing primitives, enabling it to develop robust representations across diverse sensor configurations. Experiments on six HAR benchmarks demonstrate that MoPFormer not only outperforms state-of-the-art methods but also successfully generalizes across multiple datasets. More importantly, the learned motion primitives significantly enhance both interpretability and cross-dataset performance by capturing fundamental movement patterns that remain consistent across similar activities, regardless of dataset origin.
ROApr 10, 2025
Learning Long Short-Term Intention within Human Daily BehaviorsZhe Sun, Rujie Wu, Xiaodong Yang et al.
In the domain of autonomous household robots, it is of utmost importance for robots to understand human behaviors and provide appropriate services. This requires the robots to possess the capability to analyze complex human behaviors and predict the true intentions of humans. Traditionally, humans are perceived as flawless, with their decisions acting as the standards that robots should strive to align with. However, this raises a pertinent question: What if humans make mistakes? In this research, we present a unique task, termed "long short-term intention prediction". This task requires robots can predict the long-term intention of humans, which aligns with human values, and the short term intention of humans, which reflects the immediate action intention. Meanwhile, the robots need to detect the potential non-consistency between the short-term and long-term intentions, and provide necessary warnings and suggestions. To facilitate this task, we propose a long short-term intention model to represent the complex intention states, and build a dataset to train this intention model. Then we propose a two-stage method to integrate the intention model for robots: i) predicting human intentions of both value-based long-term intentions and action-based short-term intentions; and 2) analyzing the consistency between the long-term and short-term intentions. Experimental results indicate that the proposed long short-term intention model can assist robots in comprehending human behavioral patterns over both long-term and short-term durations, which helps determine the consistency between long-term and short-term intentions of humans.
CVMar 31, 2025
Expanding-and-Shrinking Binary Neural NetworksXulong Shi, Caiyi Sun, Zhi Qi et al.
While binary neural networks (BNNs) offer significant benefits in terms of speed, memory and energy, they encounter substantial accuracy degradation in challenging tasks compared to their real-valued counterparts. Due to the binarization of weights and activations, the possible values of each entry in the feature maps generated by BNNs are strongly constrained. To tackle this limitation, we propose the expanding-and-shrinking operation, which enhances binary feature maps with negligible increase of computation complexity, thereby strengthening the representation capacity. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmarks reveal that our approach generalizes well across diverse applications ranging from image classification, object detection to generative diffusion model, while also achieving remarkable improvement over various leading binarization algorithms based on different architectures including both CNNs and Transformers.
LGOct 27, 2025
ScaLoRA: Optimally Scaled Low-Rank Adaptation for Efficient High-Rank Fine-TuningYilang Zhang, Xiaodong Yang, Yiwei Cai et al.
As large language models (LLMs) continue to scale in size, the computational overhead has become a major bottleneck for task-specific fine-tuning. While low-rank adaptation (LoRA) effectively curtails this cost by confining the weight updates to a low-dimensional subspace, such a restriction can hinder effectiveness and slow convergence. This contribution deals with these limitations by accumulating progressively a high-rank weight update from consecutive low-rank increments. Specifically, the per update optimal low-rank matrix is identified to minimize the loss function and closely approximate full fine-tuning. To endow efficient and seamless optimization without restarting, this optimal choice is formed by appropriately scaling the columns of the original low-rank matrix. Rigorous performance guarantees reveal that the optimal scaling can be found analytically. Extensive numerical tests with popular LLMs scaling up to 12 billion parameters demonstrate a consistent performance gain and fast convergence relative to state-of-the-art LoRA variants on diverse tasks including natural language understanding, commonsense reasoning, and mathematical problem solving.
CLApr 21, 2025
Evaluating LLMs on Chinese Topic Constructions: A Research Proposal Inspired by Tian et al. (2024)Xiaodong Yang
This paper proposes a framework for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on Chinese topic constructions, focusing on their sensitivity to island constraints. Drawing inspiration from Tian et al. (2024), we outline an experimental design for testing LLMs' grammatical knowledge of Mandarin syntax. While no experiments have been conducted yet, this proposal aims to provide a foundation for future studies and invites feedback on the methodology.
IRJun 23, 2024
SimCE: Simplifying Cross-Entropy Loss for Collaborative FilteringXiaodong Yang, Huiyuan Chen, Yuchen Yan et al.
The learning objective is integral to collaborative filtering systems, where the Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) loss is widely used for learning informative backbones. However, BPR often experiences slow convergence and suboptimal local optima, partially because it only considers one negative item for each positive item, neglecting the potential impacts of other unobserved items. To address this issue, the recently proposed Sampled Softmax Cross-Entropy (SSM) compares one positive sample with multiple negative samples, leading to better performance. Our comprehensive experiments confirm that recommender systems consistently benefit from multiple negative samples during training. Furthermore, we introduce a \underline{Sim}plified Sampled Softmax \underline{C}ross-\underline{E}ntropy Loss (SimCE), which simplifies the SSM using its upper bound. Our validation on 12 benchmark datasets, using both MF and LightGCN backbones, shows that SimCE significantly outperforms both BPR and SSM.
CVMay 8, 2023
PillarNeXt: Rethinking Network Designs for 3D Object Detection in LiDAR Point CloudsJinyu Li, Chenxu Luo, Xiaodong Yang
In order to deal with the sparse and unstructured raw point clouds, LiDAR based 3D object detection research mostly focuses on designing dedicated local point aggregators for fine-grained geometrical modeling. In this paper, we revisit the local point aggregators from the perspective of allocating computational resources. We find that the simplest pillar based models perform surprisingly well considering both accuracy and latency. Additionally, we show that minimal adaptions from the success of 2D object detection, such as enlarging receptive field, significantly boost the performance. Extensive experiments reveal that our pillar based networks with modernized designs in terms of architecture and training render the state-of-the-art performance on the two popular benchmarks: Waymo Open Dataset and nuScenes. Our results challenge the common intuition that the detailed geometry modeling is essential to achieve high performance for 3D object detection.
CVFeb 28, 2022
Attribute Descent: Simulating Object-Centric Datasets on the Content Level and BeyondYue Yao, Liang Zheng, Xiaodong Yang et al.
This article aims to use graphic engines to simulate a large number of training data that have free annotations and possibly strongly resemble to real-world data. Between synthetic and real, a two-level domain gap exists, involving content level and appearance level. While the latter is concerned with appearance style, the former problem arises from a different mechanism, i.e, content mismatch in attributes such as camera viewpoint, object placement and lighting conditions. In contrast to the widely-studied appearance-level gap, the content-level discrepancy has not been broadly studied. To address the content-level misalignment, we propose an attribute descent approach that automatically optimizes engine attributes to enable synthetic data to approximate real-world data. We verify our method on object-centric tasks, wherein an object takes up a major portion of an image. In these tasks, the search space is relatively small, and the optimization of each attribute yields sufficiently obvious supervision signals. We collect a new synthetic asset VehicleX, and reformat and reuse existing the synthetic assets ObjectX and PersonX. Extensive experiments on image classification and object re-identification confirm that adapted synthetic data can be effectively used in three scenarios: training with synthetic data only, training data augmentation and numerically understanding dataset content.
CVNov 16, 2021
Learning Intrinsic Images for ClothingKuo Jiang, Zian Wang, Xiaodong Yang
Reconstruction of human clothing is an important task and often relies on intrinsic image decomposition. With a lack of domain-specific data and coarse evaluation metrics, existing models failed to produce satisfying results for graphics applications. In this paper, we focus on intrinsic image decomposition for clothing images and have comprehensive improvements. We collected CloIntrinsics, a clothing intrinsic image dataset, including a synthetic training set and a real-world testing set. A more interpretable edge-aware metric and an annotation scheme is designed for the testing set, which allows diagnostic evaluation for intrinsic models. Finally, we propose ClothInNet model with carefully designed loss terms and an adversarial module. It utilizes easy-to-acquire labels to learn from real-world shading, significantly improves performance with only minor additional annotation effort. We show that our proposed model significantly reduce texture-copying artifacts while retaining surprisingly tiny details, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods.
CVAug 23, 2021
Exploring Simple 3D Multi-Object Tracking for Autonomous DrivingChenxu Luo, Xiaodong Yang, Alan Yuille
3D multi-object tracking in LiDAR point clouds is a key ingredient for self-driving vehicles. Existing methods are predominantly based on the tracking-by-detection pipeline and inevitably require a heuristic matching step for the detection association. In this paper, we present SimTrack to simplify the hand-crafted tracking paradigm by proposing an end-to-end trainable model for joint detection and tracking from raw point clouds. Our key design is to predict the first-appear location of each object in a given snippet to get the tracking identity and then update the location based on motion estimation. In the inference, the heuristic matching step can be completely waived by a simple read-off operation. SimTrack integrates the tracked object association, newborn object detection, and dead track killing in a single unified model. We conduct extensive evaluations on two large-scale datasets: nuScenes and Waymo Open Dataset. Experimental results reveal that our simple approach compares favorably with the state-of-the-art methods while ruling out the heuristic matching rules.
LGAug 9, 2021
Neural Network Repair with Reachability AnalysisXiaodong Yang, Tom Yamaguchi, Hoang-Dung Tran et al.
Safety is a critical concern for the next generation of autonomy that is likely to rely heavily on deep neural networks for perception and control. Formally verifying the safety and robustness of well-trained DNNs and learning-enabled systems under attacks, model uncertainties, and sensing errors is essential for safe autonomy. This research proposes a framework to repair unsafe DNNs in safety-critical systems with reachability analysis. The repair process is inspired by adversarial training which has demonstrated high effectiveness in improving the safety and robustness of DNNs. Different from traditional adversarial training approaches where adversarial examples are utilized from random attacks and may not be representative of all unsafe behaviors, our repair process uses reachability analysis to compute the exact unsafe regions and identify sufficiently representative examples to enhance the efficacy and efficiency of the adversarial training. The performance of our framework is evaluated on two types of benchmarks without safe models as references. One is a DNN controller for aircraft collision avoidance with access to training data. The other is a rocket lander where our framework can be seamlessly integrated with the well-known deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) reinforcement learning algorithm. The experimental results show that our framework can successfully repair all instances on multiple safety specifications with negligible performance degradation. In addition, to increase the computational and memory efficiency of the reachability analysis algorithm, we propose a depth-first-search algorithm that combines an existing exact analysis method with an over-approximation approach based on a new set representation. Experimental results show that our method achieves a five-fold improvement in runtime and a two-fold improvement in memory usage compared to exact analysis.
CVJun 22, 2021
Reachability Analysis of Convolutional Neural NetworksXiaodong Yang, Tomoya Yamaguchi, Hoang-Dung Tran et al.
Deep convolutional neural networks have been widely employed as an effective technique to handle complex and practical problems. However, one of the fundamental problems is the lack of formal methods to analyze their behavior. To address this challenge, we propose an approach to compute the exact reachable sets of a network given an input domain, where the reachable set is represented by the face lattice structure. Besides the computation of reachable sets, our approach is also capable of backtracking to the input domain given an output reachable set. Therefore, a full analysis of a network's behavior can be realized. In addition, an approach for fast analysis is also introduced, which conducts fast computation of reachable sets by considering selected sensitive neurons in each layer. The exact pixel-level reachability analysis method is evaluated on a CNN for the CIFAR10 dataset and compared to related works. The fast analysis method is evaluated over a CNN CIFAR10 dataset and VGG16 architecture for the ImageNet dataset.
CVApr 25, 2021
The 5th AI City ChallengeMilind Naphade, Shuo Wang, David C. Anastasiu et al.
The AI City Challenge was created with two goals in mind: (1) pushing the boundaries of research and development in intelligent video analysis for smarter cities use cases, and (2) assessing tasks where the level of performance is enough to cause real-world adoption. Transportation is a segment ripe for such adoption. The fifth AI City Challenge attracted 305 participating teams across 38 countries, who leveraged city-scale real traffic data and high-quality synthetic data to compete in five challenge tracks. Track 1 addressed video-based automatic vehicle counting, where the evaluation being conducted on both algorithmic effectiveness and computational efficiency. Track 2 addressed city-scale vehicle re-identification with augmented synthetic data to substantially increase the training set for the task. Track 3 addressed city-scale multi-target multi-camera vehicle tracking. Track 4 addressed traffic anomaly detection. Track 5 was a new track addressing vehicle retrieval using natural language descriptions. The evaluation system shows a general leader board of all submitted results, and a public leader board of results limited to the contest participation rules, where teams are not allowed to use external data in their work. The public leader board shows results more close to real-world situations where annotated data is limited. Results show the promise of AI in Smarter Transportation. State-of-the-art performance for some tasks shows that these technologies are ready for adoption in real-world systems.
CVApr 18, 2021
Self-Supervised Pillar Motion Learning for Autonomous DrivingChenxu Luo, Xiaodong Yang, Alan Yuille
Autonomous driving can benefit from motion behavior comprehension when interacting with diverse traffic participants in highly dynamic environments. Recently, there has been a growing interest in estimating class-agnostic motion directly from point clouds. Current motion estimation methods usually require vast amount of annotated training data from self-driving scenes. However, manually labeling point clouds is notoriously difficult, error-prone and time-consuming. In this paper, we seek to answer the research question of whether the abundant unlabeled data collections can be utilized for accurate and efficient motion learning. To this end, we propose a learning framework that leverages free supervisory signals from point clouds and paired camera images to estimate motion purely via self-supervision. Our model involves a point cloud based structural consistency augmented with probabilistic motion masking as well as a cross-sensor motion regularization to realize the desired self-supervision. Experiments reveal that our approach performs competitively to supervised methods, and achieves the state-of-the-art result when combining our self-supervised model with supervised fine-tuning.
CVOct 21, 2020
UFO$^2$: A Unified Framework towards Omni-supervised Object DetectionZhongzheng Ren, Zhiding Yu, Xiaodong Yang et al.
Existing work on object detection often relies on a single form of annotation: the model is trained using either accurate yet costly bounding boxes or cheaper but less expressive image-level tags. However, real-world annotations are often diverse in form, which challenges these existing works. In this paper, we present UFO$^2$, a unified object detection framework that can handle different forms of supervision simultaneously. Specifically, UFO$^2$ incorporates strong supervision (e.g., boxes), various forms of partial supervision (e.g., class tags, points, and scribbles), and unlabeled data. Through rigorous evaluations, we demonstrate that each form of label can be utilized to either train a model from scratch or to further improve a pre-trained model. We also use UFO$^2$ to investigate budget-aware omni-supervised learning, i.e., various annotation policies are studied under a fixed annotation budget: we show that competitive performance needs no strong labels for all data. Finally, we demonstrate the generalization of UFO$^2$, detecting more than 1,000 different objects without bounding box annotations.
CVJul 20, 2020
Hierarchical Contrastive Motion Learning for Video Action RecognitionXitong Yang, Xiaodong Yang, Sifei Liu et al.
One central question for video action recognition is how to model motion. In this paper, we present hierarchical contrastive motion learning, a new self-supervised learning framework to extract effective motion representations from raw video frames. Our approach progressively learns a hierarchy of motion features that correspond to different abstraction levels in a network. This hierarchical design bridges the semantic gap between low-level motion cues and high-level recognition tasks, and promotes the fusion of appearance and motion information at multiple levels. At each level, an explicit motion self-supervision is provided via contrastive learning to enforce the motion features at the current level to predict the future ones at the previous level. Thus, the motion features at higher levels are trained to gradually capture semantic dynamics and evolve more discriminative for action recognition. Our motion learning module is lightweight and flexible to be embedded into various backbone networks. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks show that the proposed approach consistently achieves superior results.
CVJul 20, 2020
Joint Disentangling and Adaptation for Cross-Domain Person Re-IdentificationYang Zou, Xiaodong Yang, Zhiding Yu et al.
Although a significant progress has been witnessed in supervised person re-identification (re-id), it remains challenging to generalize re-id models to new domains due to the huge domain gaps. Recently, there has been a growing interest in using unsupervised domain adaptation to address this scalability issue. Existing methods typically conduct adaptation on the representation space that contains both id-related and id-unrelated factors, thus inevitably undermining the adaptation efficacy of id-related features. In this paper, we seek to improve adaptation by purifying the representation space to be adapted. To this end, we propose a joint learning framework that disentangles id-related/unrelated features and enforces adaptation to work on the id-related feature space exclusively. Our model involves a disentangling module that encodes cross-domain images into a shared appearance space and two separate structure spaces, and an adaptation module that performs adversarial alignment and self-training on the shared appearance space. The two modules are co-designed to be mutually beneficial. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed joint learning framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by clear margins.
CVJun 17, 2020
Contrastive Learning for Weakly Supervised Phrase GroundingTanmay Gupta, Arash Vahdat, Gal Chechik et al.
Phrase grounding, the problem of associating image regions to caption words, is a crucial component of vision-language tasks. We show that phrase grounding can be learned by optimizing word-region attention to maximize a lower bound on mutual information between images and caption words. Given pairs of images and captions, we maximize compatibility of the attention-weighted regions and the words in the corresponding caption, compared to non-corresponding pairs of images and captions. A key idea is to construct effective negative captions for learning through language model guided word substitutions. Training with our negatives yields a $\sim10\%$ absolute gain in accuracy over randomly-sampled negatives from the training data. Our weakly supervised phrase grounding model trained on COCO-Captions shows a healthy gain of $5.7\%$ to achieve $76.7\%$ accuracy on Flickr30K Entities benchmark.
CVApr 30, 2020
The 4th AI City ChallengeMilind Naphade, Shuo Wang, David Anastasiu et al.
The AI City Challenge was created to accelerate intelligent video analysis that helps make cities smarter and safer. Transportation is one of the largest segments that can benefit from actionable insights derived from data captured by sensors, where computer vision and deep learning have shown promise in achieving large-scale practical deployment. The 4th annual edition of the AI City Challenge has attracted 315 participating teams across 37 countries, who leveraged city-scale real traffic data and high-quality synthetic data to compete in four challenge tracks. Track 1 addressed video-based automatic vehicle counting, where the evaluation is conducted on both algorithmic effectiveness and computational efficiency. Track 2 addressed city-scale vehicle re-identification with augmented synthetic data to substantially increase the training set for the task. Track 3 addressed city-scale multi-target multi-camera vehicle tracking. Track 4 addressed traffic anomaly detection. The evaluation system shows two leader boards, in which a general leader board shows all submitted results, and a public leader board shows results limited to our contest participation rules, that teams are not allowed to use external data in their work. The public leader board shows results more close to real-world situations where annotated data are limited. Our results show promise that AI technology can enable smarter and safer transportation systems.
SYApr 12, 2020
NNV: The Neural Network Verification Tool for Deep Neural Networks and Learning-Enabled Cyber-Physical SystemsHoang-Dung Tran, Xiaodong Yang, Diego Manzanas Lopez et al.
This paper presents the Neural Network Verification (NNV) software tool, a set-based verification framework for deep neural networks (DNNs) and learning-enabled cyber-physical systems (CPS). The crux of NNV is a collection of reachability algorithms that make use of a variety of set representations, such as polyhedra, star sets, zonotopes, and abstract-domain representations. NNV supports both exact (sound and complete) and over-approximate (sound) reachability algorithms for verifying safety and robustness properties of feed-forward neural networks (FFNNs) with various activation functions. For learning-enabled CPS, such as closed-loop control systems incorporating neural networks, NNV provides exact and over-approximate reachability analysis schemes for linear plant models and FFNN controllers with piecewise-linear activation functions, such as ReLUs. For similar neural network control systems (NNCS) that instead have nonlinear plant models, NNV supports over-approximate analysis by combining the star set analysis used for FFNN controllers with zonotope-based analysis for nonlinear plant dynamics building on CORA. We evaluate NNV using two real-world case studies: the first is safety verification of ACAS Xu networks and the second deals with the safety verification of a deep learning-based adaptive cruise control system.
AIMar 2, 2020
Reachability Analysis for Feed-Forward Neural Networks using Face LatticesXiaodong Yang, Hoang-Dung Tran, Weiming Xiang et al.
Deep neural networks have been widely applied as an effective approach to handle complex and practical problems. However, one of the most fundamental open problems is the lack of formal methods to analyze the safety of their behaviors. To address this challenge, we propose a parallelizable technique to compute exact reachable sets of a neural network to an input set. Our method currently focuses on feed-forward neural networks with ReLU activation functions. One of the primary challenges for polytope-based approaches is identifying the intersection between intermediate polytopes and hyperplanes from neurons. In this regard, we present a new approach to construct the polytopes with the face lattice, a complete combinatorial structure. The correctness and performance of our methodology are evaluated by verifying the safety of ACAS Xu networks and other benchmarks. Compared to state-of-the-art methods such as Reluplex, Marabou, and NNV, our approach exhibits a significantly higher efficiency. Additionally, our approach is capable of constructing the complete input set given an output set, so that any input that leads to safety violation can be tracked.
CVJan 29, 2020
Robust Multimodal Image Registration Using Deep Recurrent Reinforcement LearningShanhui Sun, Jing Hu, Mingqing Yao et al.
The crucial components of a conventional image registration method are the choice of the right feature representations and similarity measures. These two components, although elaborately designed, are somewhat handcrafted using human knowledge. To this end, these two components are tackled in an end-to-end manner via reinforcement learning in this work. Specifically, an artificial agent, which is composed of a combined policy and value network, is trained to adjust the moving image toward the right direction. We train this network using an asynchronous reinforcement learning algorithm, where a customized reward function is also leveraged to encourage robust image registration. This trained network is further incorporated with a lookahead inference to improve the registration capability. The advantage of this algorithm is fully demonstrated by our superior performance on clinical MR and CT image pairs to other state-of-the-art medical image registration methods.
LGJan 29, 2020
FOCUS: Dealing with Label Quality Disparity in Federated LearningYiqiang Chen, Xiaodong Yang, Xin Qin et al.
Ubiquitous systems with End-Edge-Cloud architecture are increasingly being used in healthcare applications. Federated Learning (FL) is highly useful for such applications, due to silo effect and privacy preserving. Existing FL approaches generally do not account for disparities in the quality of local data labels. However, the clients in ubiquitous systems tend to suffer from label noise due to varying skill-levels, biases or malicious tampering of the annotators. In this paper, we propose Federated Opportunistic Computing for Ubiquitous Systems (FOCUS) to address this challenge. It maintains a small set of benchmark samples on the FL server and quantifies the credibility of the client local data without directly observing them by computing the mutual cross-entropy between performance of the FL model on the local datasets and that of the client local FL model on the benchmark dataset. Then, a credit weighted orchestration is performed to adjust the weight assigned to clients in the FL model based on their credibility values. FOCUS has been experimentally evaluated on both synthetic data and real-world data. The results show that it effectively identifies clients with noisy labels and reduces their impact on the model performance, thereby significantly outperforming existing FL approaches.
CVNov 5, 2019
Dancing to MusicHsin-Ying Lee, Xiaodong Yang, Ming-Yu Liu et al.
Dancing to music is an instinctive move by humans. Learning to model the music-to-dance generation process is, however, a challenging problem. It requires significant efforts to measure the correlation between music and dance as one needs to simultaneously consider multiple aspects, such as style and beat of both music and dance. Additionally, dance is inherently multimodal and various following movements of a pose at any moment are equally likely. In this paper, we propose a synthesis-by-analysis learning framework to generate dance from music. In the analysis phase, we decompose a dance into a series of basic dance units, through which the model learns how to move. In the synthesis phase, the model learns how to compose a dance by organizing multiple basic dancing movements seamlessly according to the input music. Experimental qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed method can synthesize realistic, diverse,style-consistent, and beat-matching dances from music.
CVAug 18, 2019
A Delay Metric for Video Object Detection: What Average Precision Fails to TellHuizi Mao, Xiaodong Yang, William J. Dally
Average precision (AP) is a widely used metric to evaluate detection accuracy of image and video object detectors. In this paper, we analyze object detection from videos and point out that AP alone is not sufficient to capture the temporal nature of video object detection. To tackle this problem, we propose a comprehensive metric, average delay (AD), to measure and compare detection delay. To facilitate delay evaluation, we carefully select a subset of ImageNet VID, which we name as ImageNet VIDT with an emphasis on complex trajectories. By extensively evaluating a wide range of detectors on VIDT, we show that most methods drastically increase the detection delay but still preserve AP well. In other words, AP is not sensitive enough to reflect the temporal characteristics of a video object detector. Our results suggest that video object detection methods should be additionally evaluated with a delay metric, particularly for latency-critical applications such as autonomous vehicle perception.