Ruining Yang

Ruining Yang, Yuqi Peng

Autonomous driving has garnered significant attention as a key research area within artificial intelligence. In the context of autonomous driving scenarios, the varying physical locations of objects correspond to different levels of danger. However, conventional evaluation criteria for automatic driving object detection often overlook the crucial aspect of an object's physical location, leading to evaluation results that may not accurately reflect the genuine threat posed by the object to the autonomous driving vehicle. To enhance the safety of autonomous driving, this paper introduces a novel evaluation criterion based on physical location information, termed PLoc. This criterion transcends the limitations of traditional criteria by acknowledging that the physical location of pedestrians in autonomous driving scenarios can provide valuable safety-related information. Furthermore, this paper presents a newly re-annotated dataset (ApolloScape-R) derived from ApolloScape. ApolloScape-R involves the relabeling of pedestrians based on the significance of their physical location. The dataset is utilized to assess the performance of various object detection models under the proposed PLoc criterion. Experimental results demonstrate that the average accuracy of all object detection models in identifying a person situated in the travel lane of an autonomous vehicle is lower than that for a person on a sidewalk. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/lnyrlyed/ApolloScape-R.git

Yue Yao, Ruining Yang, Tom Gedeon

We explore a situation in which the target domain is accessible, but real-time data annotation is not feasible. Instead, we would like to construct an alternative training set from a large-scale data server so that a competitive model can be obtained. For this problem, because the target domain usually exhibits distinct modes (i.e., semantic clusters representing data distribution), if the training set does not contain these target modes, the model performance would be compromised. While prior existing works improve algorithms iteratively, our research explores the often-overlooked potential of optimizing the structure of the data server. Inspired by the hierarchical nature of web search engines, we introduce a hierarchical data server, together with a bipartite mode matching algorithm (BMM) to align source and target modes. For each target mode, we look in the server data tree for the best mode match, which might be large or small in size. Through bipartite matching, we aim for all target modes to be optimally matched with source modes in a one-on-one fashion. Compared with existing training set search algorithms, we show that the matched server modes constitute training sets that have consistently smaller domain gaps with the target domain across object re-identification (re-ID) and detection tasks. Consequently, models trained on our searched training sets have higher accuracy than those trained otherwise. BMM allows data-centric unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) orthogonal to existing model-centric UDA methods. By combining the BMM with existing UDA methods like pseudo-labeling, further improvement is observed.

Yixiao Chen, Yue Yao, Ruining Yang et al.

This article investigates the critical issue of dataset bias in medical imaging, with a particular emphasis on racial disparities caused by uneven population distribution in dataset collection. Our analysis reveals that medical segmentation datasets are significantly biased, primarily influenced by the demographic composition of their collection sites. For instance, Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscopy (SLO) fundus datasets collected in the United States predominantly feature images of White individuals, with minority racial groups underrepresented. This imbalance can result in biased model performance and inequitable clinical outcomes, particularly for minority populations. To address this challenge, we propose a novel training set search strategy aimed at reducing these biases by focusing on underrepresented racial groups. Our approach utilizes existing datasets and employs a simple greedy algorithm to identify source images that closely match the target domain distribution. By selecting training data that aligns more closely with the characteristics of minority populations, our strategy improves the accuracy of medical segmentation models on specific minorities, i.e., Black. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in mitigating bias. We also discuss the broader societal implications, highlighting how addressing these disparities can contribute to more equitable healthcare outcomes.

Yixiao Chen, Ruining Yang, Xin Chen et al.

The key to achieving autonomous driving lies in topology-aware perception, the structured understanding of the driving environment with an emphasis on lane topology and road semantics. This survey systematically reviews four core research directions under this theme: vectorized map construction, topological structure modeling, prior knowledge fusion, and language model-based perception. Across these directions, we observe a unifying trend: a paradigm shift from static, pre-built maps to dynamic, sensor-driven perception. Specifically, traditional static maps have provided semantic context for autonomous systems. However, they are costly to construct, difficult to update in real time, and lack generalization across regions, limiting their scalability. In contrast, dynamic representations leverage on-board sensor data for real-time map construction and topology reasoning. Each of the four research directions contributes to this shift through compact spatial modeling, semantic relational reasoning, robust domain knowledge integration, and multimodal scene understanding powered by pre-trained language models. Together, they pave the way for more adaptive, scalable, and explainable autonomous driving systems.