Yulin Zhang

Bin Yang, Yulin Zhang, Hong-Yu Zhou et al.

Detection transformers have been applied to human-object interaction (HOI) detection, enhancing the localization and recognition of human-action-object triplets in images. Despite remarkable progress, this study identifies a critical issue-"Toxic Siblings" bias-which hinders the interaction decoder's learning, as numerous similar yet distinct HOI triplets interfere with and even compete against each other both input side and output side to the interaction decoder. This bias arises from high confusion among sibling triplets/categories, where increased similarity paradoxically reduces precision, as one's gain comes at the expense of its toxic sibling's decline. To address this, we propose two novel debiasing learning objectives-"contrastive-then-calibration" and "merge-then-split"-targeting the input and output perspectives, respectively. The former samples sibling-like incorrect HOI triplets and reconstructs them into correct ones, guided by strong positional priors. The latter first learns shared features among sibling categories to distinguish them from other groups, then explicitly refines intra-group differentiation to preserve uniqueness. Experiments show that we significantly outperform both the baseline (+9.18% mAP on HICO-Det) and the state-of-the-art (+3.59% mAP) across various settings.

Yulin Zhang, Dylan A. Shell

To treat sensing limitations (with uncertainty in both conflation of information and noise) we model sensors as covers. This leads to a semilattice organization of abstract sensors that is appropriate even when additional information is problematic (e.g., for tasks involving privacy considerations).

Yulin Zhang, Bo Ma, Longyao Liu et al.

The one-shot Person Re-ID scenario faces two kinds of uncertainties when constructing the prediction model from $X$ to $Y$. The first is model uncertainty, which captures the noise of the parameters in DNNs due to a lack of training data. The second is data uncertainty, which can be divided into two sub-types: one is image noise, where severe occlusion and the complex background contain irrelevant information about the identity; the other is label noise, where mislabeled affects visual appearance learning. In this paper, to tackle these issues, we propose a novel Self-Paced Uncertainty Estimation Network (SPUE-Net) for one-shot Person Re-ID. By introducing a self-paced sampling strategy, our method can estimate the pseudo-labels of unlabeled samples iteratively to expand the labeled samples gradually and remove model uncertainty without extra supervision. We divide the pseudo-label samples into two subsets to make the use of training samples more reasonable and effective. In addition, we apply a Co-operative learning method of local uncertainty estimation combined with determinacy estimation to achieve better hidden space feature mining and to improve the precision of selected pseudo-labeled samples, which reduces data uncertainty. Extensive comparative evaluation experiments on video-based and image-based datasets show that SPUE-Net has significant advantages over the state-of-the-art methods.

Xin Yi, Bo Ma, Yulin Zhang et al.

Caused by the difference of data distributions, intra-domain gap and inter-domain gap are widely present in image processing tasks. In the field of image dehazing, certain previous works have paid attention to the inter-domain gap between the synthetic domain and the real domain. However, those methods only establish the connection from the source domain to the target domain without taking into account the large distribution shift within the target domain (intra-domain gap). In this work, we propose a Two-Step Dehazing Network (TSDN) with an intra-domain adaptation and a constrained inter-domain adaptation. First, we subdivide the distributions within the synthetic domain into subsets and mine the optimal subset (easy samples) by loss-based supervision. To alleviate the intra-domain gap of the synthetic domain, we propose an intra-domain adaptation to align distributions of other subsets to the optimal subset by adversarial learning. Finally, we conduct the constrained inter-domain adaptation from the real domain to the optimal subset of the synthetic domain, alleviating the domain shift between domains as well as the distribution shift within the real domain. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our framework performs favorably against the state-of-the-art algorithms both on the synthetic datasets and the real datasets.

Yulin Zhang, Dylan A. Shell

Whether a robot can perform some specific task depends on several aspects, including the robot's sensors and the plans it possesses. We are interested in search algorithms that treat plans and sensor designs jointly, yielding solutions---i.e., plan and sensor characterization pairs---if and only if they exist. Such algorithms can help roboticists explore the space of sensors to aid in making design trade-offs. Generalizing prior work where sensors are modeled abstractly as sensor maps on p-graphs, the present paper increases the potential sensors which can be sought significantly. But doing so enlarges a problem currently on the outer limits of being considered tractable. Toward taming this complexity, two contributions are made: (1) we show how to represent the search space for this more general problem and describe data structures that enable whole sets of sensors to be summarized via a single special representative; (2) we give a means by which other structure (either task domain knowledge, sensor technology or fabrication constraints) can be incorporated to reduce the sets to be enumerated. These lead to algorithms that we have implemented and which suffice to solve particular problem instances, albeit only of small scale. Nevertheless, the algorithm aids in helping understand what attributes sensors must possess and what information they must provide in order to ensure a robot can achieve its goals despite non-determinism.

Yulin Zhang, Dylan A. Shell, Jason M. O'Kane

For robots acting in the presence of observers, we examine the information that is divulged if the observer is party to the robot's plan. Privacy constraints are specified as the stipulations on what can be inferred during plan execution. We imagine a case in which the robot's plan is divulged beforehand, so that the observer can use this {\em a priori} information along with the disclosed executions. The divulged plan, which can be represented by a procrustean graph, is shown to undermine privacy precisely to the extent that it can eliminate action-observation sequences that will never appear in the plan. Future work will consider how the divulged plan might be sought as the output of a planning procedure.

Yulin Zhang, Dylan A. Shell

We examine the problem of target tracking whilst simultaneously preserving the target's privacy as epitomized by the robotic panda tracking scenario, which O'Kane introduced at the 2008 Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics in order to elegantly illustrate the utility of ignorance. The present paper reconsiders his formulation and the tracking strategy he proposed, along with its completeness. We explore how the capabilities of the robot and panda affect the feasibility of tracking with a privacy stipulation, uncovering intrinsic limits, no matter the strategy employed. This paper begins with a one-dimensional setting and, putting the trivially infeasible problems aside, analyzes the strategy space as a function of problem parameters. We show that it is not possible to actively track the target as well as protect its privacy for every nontrivial pair of tracking and privacy stipulations. Secondly, feasibility can be sensitive, in several cases, to the information available to the robot initially. Quite naturally in the one-dimensional model, one may quantify sensing power by the number of perceptual (or output) classes available to the robot. The robot's power to achieve privacy-preserving tracking is bounded, converging asymptotically with increasing sensing power. We analyze the entire space of possible tracking problems, characterizing every instance as either achievable, constructively by giving a policy where one exists (some of which depend on the initial information), or proving the instance impossible. Finally, to relate some of the impossibility results in one dimension to their higher-dimensional counterparts, including the planar panda tracking problem studied by O'Kane, we establish a connection between tracking dimensionality and the sensing power of a one-dimensional robot.