Yi Xu

Yi Xu, Lichen Wang, Yizhou Wang et al.

Pedestrian trajectory prediction is an essential component in a wide range of AI applications such as autonomous driving and robotics. Existing methods usually assume the training and testing motions follow the same pattern while ignoring the potential distribution differences (e.g., shopping mall and street). This issue results in inevitable performance decrease. To address this issue, we propose a novel Transferable Graph Neural Network (T-GNN) framework, which jointly conducts trajectory prediction as well as domain alignment in a unified framework. Specifically, a domain-invariant GNN is proposed to explore the structural motion knowledge where the domain-specific knowledge is reduced. Moreover, an attention-based adaptive knowledge learning module is further proposed to explore fine-grained individual-level feature representations for knowledge transfer. By this way, disparities across different trajectory domains will be better alleviated. More challenging while practical trajectory prediction experiments are designed, and the experimental results verify the superior performance of our proposed model. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the pioneer which fills the gap in benchmarks and techniques for practical pedestrian trajectory prediction across different domains.

Minghao Xu, Yuanfan Guo, Yi Xu et al.

Modeling spatial relationship in the data remains critical across many different tasks, such as image classification, semantic segmentation and protein structure understanding. Previous works often use a unified solution like relative positional encoding. However, there exists different kinds of spatial relations, including short-range, medium-range and long-range relations, and modeling them separately can better capture the focus of different tasks on the multi-range relations (e.g., short-range relations can be important in instance segmentation, while long-range relations should be upweighted for semantic segmentation). In this work, we introduce the EurNet for Efficient multi-range relational modeling. EurNet constructs the multi-relational graph, where each type of edge corresponds to short-, medium- or long-range spatial interactions. In the constructed graph, EurNet adopts a novel modeling layer, called gated relational message passing (GRMP), to propagate multi-relational information across the data. GRMP captures multiple relations within the data with little extra computational cost. We study EurNets in two important domains for image and protein structure modeling. Extensive experiments on ImageNet classification, COCO object detection and ADE20K semantic segmentation verify the gains of EurNet over the previous SoTA FocalNet. On the EC and GO protein function prediction benchmarks, EurNet consistently surpasses the previous SoTA GearNet. Our results demonstrate the strength of EurNets on modeling spatial multi-relational data from various domains. The implementations of EurNet for image modeling are available at https://github.com/hirl-team/EurNet-Image . The implementations for other applied domains/tasks will be released soon.

Yi Xu, Armin Bazarjani, Hyung-gun Chi et al.

Trajectory prediction is a crucial undertaking in understanding entity movement or human behavior from observed sequences. However, current methods often assume that the observed sequences are complete while ignoring the potential for missing values caused by object occlusion, scope limitation, sensor failure, etc. This limitation inevitably hinders the accuracy of trajectory prediction. To address this issue, our paper presents a unified framework, the Graph-based Conditional Variational Recurrent Neural Network (GC-VRNN), which can perform trajectory imputation and prediction simultaneously. Specifically, we introduce a novel Multi-Space Graph Neural Network (MS-GNN) that can extract spatial features from incomplete observations and leverage missing patterns. Additionally, we employ a Conditional VRNN with a specifically designed Temporal Decay (TD) module to capture temporal dependencies and temporal missing patterns in incomplete trajectories. The inclusion of the TD module allows for valuable information to be conveyed through the temporal flow. We also curate and benchmark three practical datasets for the joint problem of trajectory imputation and prediction. Extensive experiments verify the exceptional performance of our proposed method. As far as we know, this is the first work to address the lack of benchmarks and techniques for trajectory imputation and prediction in a unified manner.

Qiran Zou, Shangyuan Yuan, Shian Du et al.

We study a challenging task: text-to-motion synthesis, aiming to generate motions that align with textual descriptions and exhibit coordinated movements. Currently, the part-based methods introduce part partition into the motion synthesis process to achieve finer-grained generation. However, these methods encounter challenges such as the lack of coordination between different part motions and difficulties for networks to understand part concepts. Moreover, introducing finer-grained part concepts poses computational complexity challenges. In this paper, we propose Part-Coordinating Text-to-Motion Synthesis (ParCo), endowed with enhanced capabilities for understanding part motions and communication among different part motion generators, ensuring a coordinated and fined-grained motion synthesis. Specifically, we discretize whole-body motion into multiple part motions to establish the prior concept of different parts. Afterward, we employ multiple lightweight generators designed to synthesize different part motions and coordinate them through our part coordination module. Our approach demonstrates superior performance on common benchmarks with economic computations, including HumanML3D and KIT-ML, providing substantial evidence of its effectiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/qrzou/ParCo .

Pan Ji, Yuan Tian, Qingan Yan et al.

We present a robust visual-inertial SLAM system that combines the benefits of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and planar constraints. Our system leverages a CNN to predict the depth map and the corresponding uncertainty map for each image. The CNN depth effectively bootstraps the back-end optimization of SLAM and meanwhile the CNN uncertainty adaptively weighs the contribution of each feature point to the back-end optimization. Given the gravity direction from the inertial sensor, we further present a fast plane detection method that detects horizontal planes via one-point RANSAC and vertical planes via two-point RANSAC. Those stably detected planes are in turn used to regularize the back-end optimization of SLAM. We evaluate our system on a public dataset, \ie, EuRoC, and demonstrate improved results over a state-of-the-art SLAM system, \ie, ORB-SLAM3.

Yuzhong Huang, Zhong Li, Zhang Chen et al.

In the evolving landscape of text-to-3D technology, Dreamfusion has showcased its proficiency by utilizing Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) to optimize implicit representations such as NeRF. This process is achieved through the distillation of pretrained large-scale text-to-image diffusion models. However, Dreamfusion encounters fidelity and efficiency constraints: it faces the multi-head Janus issue and exhibits a relatively slow optimization process. To circumvent these challenges, we introduce OrientDream, a camera orientation conditioned framework designed for efficient and multi-view consistent 3D generation from textual prompts. Our strategy emphasizes the implementation of an explicit camera orientation conditioned feature in the pre-training of a 2D text-to-image diffusion module. This feature effectively utilizes data from MVImgNet, an extensive external multi-view dataset, to refine and bolster its functionality. Subsequently, we utilize the pre-conditioned 2D images as a basis for optimizing a randomly initialized implicit representation (NeRF). This process is significantly expedited by a decoupled back-propagation technique, allowing for multiple updates of implicit parameters per optimization cycle. Our experiments reveal that our method not only produces high-quality NeRF models with consistent multi-view properties but also achieves an optimization speed significantly greater than existing methods, as quantified by comparative metrics.

Xu Yi, Gregory S. Chirikjian

A new, and extremely fast, computational modeling paradigm is introduced here for specific finite elasticity problems that arise in the context of soft robotics. Whereas continuum mechanics is a very classical area of study, and significant effort has been devoted to the development of intricate constitutive models for finite elasticity, we show that in the kinds of large-strain mechanics problems arising in soft robotics, many of the parameters in constitutive models are irrelevant. For the most part, the isochoric (locally volume-preserving) constraint dominates behavior, and this can be built into closed-form kinematic deformation fields before even considering other aspects of constitutive modeling. We therefore focus on developing and applying primitive deformations that each observe this constraint. It is shown that by composing a wide enough variety of such deformations that the most common behaviors observed in soft robots can be replicated. Case studies include an inflatable rubber chamber, a slender rubber rod, and a rubber block subjected to different boundary conditions. We show that this method is at least 50 times faster than the ABAQUS implementation of the finite element method (FEM). Physical experiments and measurements show that both our method and ABAQUS have approximately 10% error relative to experimentally measured displacements, as well as to each other. Our method provides a real-time alternative to FEM, and captures essential degrees of freedom for use in feedback control systems.