Fang Li

Hongliang Zeng, Ping Zhang, Chengjiong Wu et al.

Precise perception of articulated objects is vital for empowering service robots. Recent studies mainly focus on point cloud, a single-modal approach, often neglecting vital texture and lighting details and assuming ideal conditions like optimal viewpoints, unrepresentative of real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce MARS, a novel framework for articulated object characterization. It features a multi-modal fusion module utilizing multi-scale RGB features to enhance point cloud features, coupled with reinforcement learning-based active sensing for autonomous optimization of observation viewpoints. In experiments conducted with various articulated object instances from the PartNet-Mobility dataset, our method outperformed current state-of-the-art methods in joint parameter estimation accuracy. Additionally, through active sensing, MARS further reduces errors, demonstrating enhanced efficiency in handling suboptimal viewpoints. Furthermore, our method effectively generalizes to real-world articulated objects, enhancing robot interactions. Code is available at https://github.com/robhlzeng/MARS.

Jian Yang, Jiahui Wu, Li Fang et al.

Transforming road network data into vector representations using deep learning has proven effective for road network analysis. However, urban road networks' heterogeneous and hierarchical nature poses challenges for accurate representation learning. Graph neural networks, which aggregate features from neighboring nodes, often struggle due to their homogeneity assumption and focus on a single structural scale. To address these issues, this paper presents MSRFormer, a novel road network representation learning framework that integrates multi-scale spatial interactions by addressing their flow heterogeneity and long-distance dependencies. It uses spatial flow convolution to extract small-scale features from large trajectory datasets, and identifies scale-dependent spatial interaction regions to capture the spatial structure of road networks and flow heterogeneity. By employing a graph transformer, MSRFormer effectively captures complex spatial dependencies across multiple scales. The spatial interaction features are fused using residual connections, which are fed to a contrastive learning algorithm to derive the final road network representation. Validation on two real-world datasets demonstrates that MSRFormer outperforms baseline methods in two road network analysis tasks. The performance gains of MSRFormer suggest the traffic-related task benefits more from incorporating trajectory data, also resulting in greater improvements in complex road network structures with up to 16% improvements compared to the most competitive baseline method. This research provides a practical framework for developing task-agnostic road network representation models and highlights distinct association patterns of the interplay between scale effects and flow heterogeneity of spatial interactions.

Hongliang Zeng, Ping Zhang, Fang Li et al.

Representation and generative learning, as reconstruction-based methods, have demonstrated their potential for mutual reinforcement across various domains. In the field of point cloud processing, although existing studies have adopted training strategies from generative models to enhance representational capabilities, these methods are limited by their inability to genuinely generate 3D shapes. To explore the benefits of deeply integrating 3D representation learning and generative learning, we propose an innovative framework called \textit{Point-MGE}. Specifically, this framework first utilizes a vector quantized variational autoencoder to reconstruct a neural field representation of 3D shapes, thereby learning discrete semantic features of point patches. Subsequently, we design a sliding masking ratios to smooth the transition from representation learning to generative learning. Moreover, our method demonstrates strong generalization capability in learning high-capacity models, achieving new state-of-the-art performance across multiple downstream tasks. In shape classification, Point-MGE achieved an accuracy of 94.2% (+1.0%) on the ModelNet40 dataset and 92.9% (+5.5%) on the ScanObjectNN dataset. Experimental results also confirmed that Point-MGE can generate high-quality 3D shapes in both unconditional and conditional settings.

Huiqing Qi, Fang Li, Shengli Tan et al.

The wide applications of Generative adversarial networks benefit from the successful training methods, guaranteeing that an object function converges to the local minima. Nevertheless, designing an efficient and competitive training method is still a challenging task due to the cyclic behaviors of some gradient-based ways and the expensive computational cost of these methods based on the Hessian matrix. This paper proposed the adaptive Composite Gradients (ACG) method, linearly convergent in bilinear games under suitable settings. Theory and toy-function experiments suggest that our approach can alleviate the cyclic behaviors and converge faster than recently proposed algorithms. Significantly, the ACG method is not only used to find stable fixed points in bilinear games as well as in general games. The ACG method is a novel semi-gradient-free algorithm since it does not need to calculate the gradient of each step, reducing the computational cost of gradient and Hessian by utilizing the predictive information in future iterations. We conducted two mixture of Gaussians experiments by integrating ACG to existing algorithms with Linear GANs. Results show ACG is competitive with the previous algorithms. Realistic experiments on four prevalent data sets (MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CelebA) with DCGANs show that our ACG method outperforms several baselines, which illustrates the superiority and efficacy of our method.