Keren Li

Mengchen Fan, Baocheng Geng, Roman Shterenberg et al.

In distributed and federated learning, heterogeneity across data sources remains a major obstacle to effective model aggregation and convergence. We focus on feature heterogeneity and introduce energy distance as a sensitive measure for quantifying distributional discrepancies. While we show that energy distance is robust for detecting data distribution shifts, its direct use in large-scale systems can be prohibitively expensive. To address this, we develop Taylor approximations that preserve key theoretical quantitative properties while reducing computational overhead. Through simulation studies, we show how accurately capturing feature discrepancies boosts convergence in distributed learning. Finally, we propose a novel application of energy distance to assign penalty weights for aligning predictions across heterogeneous nodes, ultimately enhancing coordination in federated and distributed settings.

Xiangbin Wei, Yuanfeng Wang, Ao XU et al.

Building on recent advances in Bayesian statistics and image denoising, we propose Noise2Score3D, a fully unsupervised framework for point cloud denoising. Noise2Score3D learns the score function of the underlying point cloud distribution directly from noisy data, eliminating the need for clean data during training. Using Tweedie's formula, our method performs denoising in a single step, avoiding the iterative processes used in existing unsupervised methods, thus improving both accuracy and efficiency. Additionally, we introduce Total Variation for Point Clouds as a denoising quality metric, which allows for the estimation of unknown noise parameters. Experimental results demonstrate that Noise2Score3D achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks among unsupervised learning methods in Chamfer distance and point-to-mesh metrics. Noise2Score3D also demonstrates strong generalization ability beyond training datasets. Our method, by addressing the generalization issue and challenge of the absence of clean data in learning-based methods, paves the way for learning-based point cloud denoising methods in real-world applications.

JunYing Huang, Ao Xu, DongSun Yong et al.

Odometry is a critical task for autonomous systems for self-localization and navigation. We propose a novel LiDAR-Visual odometry framework that integrates LiDAR point clouds and images for accurate and robust pose estimation. Our method utilizes a dense-depth map estimated from point clouds and images through depth completion, and incorporates a multi-scale feature extraction network with attention mechanisms, enabling adaptive depth-aware representations. Furthermore, we leverage dense depth information to refine flow estimation and mitigate errors in occlusion-prone regions. Our hierarchical pose refinement module optimizes motion estimation progressively, ensuring robust predictions against dynamic environments and scale ambiguities. Comprehensive experiments on the KITTI odometry benchmark demonstrate that our approach achieves similar or superior accuracy and robustness compared to state-of-the-art visual and LiDAR odometry methods.

Mengchen Fan, Baocheng Geng, Keren Li et al.

This paper introduces a representative-based approach for distributed learning that transforms multiple raw data points into a virtual representation. Unlike traditional distributed learning methods such as Federated Learning, which do not offer human interpretability, our method makes complex machine learning processes accessible and comprehensible. It achieves this by condensing extensive datasets into digestible formats, thus fostering intuitive human-machine interactions. Additionally, this approach maintains privacy and communication efficiency, and it matches the training performance of models using raw data. Simulation results show that our approach is competitive with or outperforms traditional Federated Learning in accuracy and convergence, especially in scenarios with complex models and a higher number of clients. This framework marks a step forward in integrating human intuition with machine intelligence, which potentially enhances human-machine learning interfaces and collaborative efforts.