Jianhua He

Xinhang Li, Yiying Yang, Zheng Yuan et al.

Multi-vehicle pursuit (MVP) such as autonomous police vehicles pursuing suspects is important but very challenging due to its mission and safety critical nature. While multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms have been proposed for MVP problem in structured grid-pattern roads, the existing algorithms use randomly training samples in centralized learning, which leads to homogeneous agents showing low collaboration performance. For the more challenging problem of pursuing multiple evading vehicles, these algorithms typically select a fixed target evading vehicle for pursuing vehicles without considering dynamic traffic situation, which significantly reduces pursuing success rate. To address the above problems, this paper proposes a Progression Cognition Reinforcement Learning with Prioritized Experience for MVP (PEPCRL-MVP) in urban multi-intersection dynamic traffic scenes. PEPCRL-MVP uses a prioritization network to assess the transitions in the global experience replay buffer according to the parameters of each MARL agent. With the personalized and prioritized experience set selected via the prioritization network, diversity is introduced to the learning process of MARL, which can improve collaboration and task related performance. Furthermore, PEPCRL-MVP employs an attention module to extract critical features from complex urban traffic environments. These features are used to develop progression cognition method to adaptively group pursuing vehicles. Each group efficiently target one evading vehicle in dynamic driving environments. Extensive experiments conducted with a simulator over unstructured roads of an urban area show that PEPCRL-MVP is superior to other state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, PEPCRL-MVP improves pursuing efficiency by 3.95% over TD3-DMAP and its success rate is 34.78% higher than that of MADDPG. Codes are open sourced.

Xuedou Xiao, Juecheng Zhang, Wei Wang et al.

Deep learning has shown impressive performance in semantic segmentation, but it is still unaffordable for resource-constrained mobile devices. While offloading computation tasks is promising, the high traffic demands overwhelm the limited bandwidth. Existing compression algorithms are not fit for semantic segmentation, as the lack of obvious and concentrated regions of interest (RoIs) forces the adoption of uniform compression strategies, leading to low compression ratios or accuracy. This paper introduces STAC, a DNN-driven compression scheme tailored for edge-assisted semantic video segmentation. STAC is the first to exploit DNN's gradients as spatial sensitivity metrics for spatial adaptive compression and achieves superior compression ratio and accuracy. Yet, it is challenging to adapt this content-customized compression to videos. Practical issues include varying spatial sensitivity and huge bandwidth consumption for compression strategy feedback and offloading. We tackle these issues through a spatiotemporal adaptive scheme, which (1) takes partial strategy generation operations offline to reduce communication load, and (2) propagates compression strategies and segmentation results across frames through dense optical flow, and adaptively offloads keyframes to accommodate video content. We implement STAC on a commodity mobile device. Experiments show that STAC can save up to 20.95% of bandwidth without losing accuracy, compared to the state-of-the-art algorithm.

Yuhang Zhou, Zhibin Wang, Peng Jiang et al.

Training large language models faces frequent interruptions due to various faults, demanding robust fault-tolerance. Existing backup-free methods, such as redundant computation, dynamic parallelism, and data rerouting, each incur performance penalties, whether from ongoing overhead, lengthy reconfigurations, or post-recovery inefficiencies. We propose Chameleon, an adaptive fault-tolerant system that intelligently selects optimal recovery strategies when a failure occurs. Chameleon achieves this through a unified performance model, expedient execution plan search, accurate performance estimation, and efficient communication optimizations. Experiments on a 32-card cluster show that Chameleon maintains a performance gap of within 11.00% between post-recovery and failure-free training, while preserving model convergence and efficient memory usage. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, Chameleon achieves up to 1.229x and 1.355x higher average throughput than Oobleck and Recycle, respectively.

Shengkai Zhang, Yuhe Liu, Guanjun Wu et al.

VIM-GS is a Gaussian Splatting (GS) framework using monocular images for novel-view synthesis (NVS) in large scenes. GS typically requires accurate depth to initiate Gaussian ellipsoids using RGB-D/stereo cameras. Their limited depth sensing range makes it difficult for GS to work in large scenes. Monocular images, however, lack depth to guide the learning and lead to inferior NVS results. Although large foundation models (LFMs) for monocular depth estimation are available, they suffer from cross-frame inconsistency, inaccuracy for distant scenes, and ambiguity in deceptive texture cues. This paper aims to generate dense, accurate depth images from monocular RGB inputs for high-definite GS rendering. The key idea is to leverage the accurate but sparse depth from visual-inertial Structure-from-Motion (SfM) to refine the dense but coarse depth from LFMs. To bridge the sparse input and dense output, we propose an object-segmented depth propagation algorithm that renders the depth of pixels of structured objects. Then we develop a dynamic depth refinement module to handle the crippled SfM depth of dynamic objects and refine the coarse LFM depth. Experiments using public and customized datasets demonstrate the superior rendering quality of VIM-GS in large scenes.

Kezhong Liu, Yiwen Zhou, Mozi Chen et al.

This work proposes a mmWave radar's scene flow estimation framework supervised by data from a widespread visual-inertial (VI) sensor suite, allowing crowdsourced training data from smart vehicles. Current scene flow estimation methods for mmWave radar are typically supervised by dense point clouds from 3D LiDARs, which are expensive and not widely available in smart vehicles. While VI data are more accessible, visual images alone cannot capture the 3D motions of moving objects, making it difficult to supervise their scene flow. Moreover, the temporal drift of VI rigid transformation also degenerates the scene flow estimation of static points. To address these challenges, we propose a drift-free rigid transformation estimator that fuses kinematic model-based ego-motions with neural network-learned results. It provides strong supervision signals to radar-based rigid transformation and infers the scene flow of static points. Then, we develop an optical-mmWave supervision extraction module that extracts the supervision signals of radar rigid transformation and scene flow. It strengthens the supervision by learning the scene flow of dynamic points with the joint constraints of optical and mmWave radar measurements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, in smoke-filled environments, our method even outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches using costly LiDARs.

Zheng Huang, Kai Chen, Jianhua He et al.

Scanned receipts OCR and key information extraction (SROIE) represent the processeses of recognizing text from scanned receipts and extracting key texts from them and save the extracted tests to structured documents. SROIE plays critical roles for many document analysis applications and holds great commercial potentials, but very little research works and advances have been published in this area. In recognition of the technical challenges, importance and huge commercial potentials of SROIE, we organized the ICDAR 2019 competition on SROIE. In this competition, we set up three tasks, namely, Scanned Receipt Text Localisation (Task 1), Scanned Receipt OCR (Task 2) and Key Information Extraction from Scanned Receipts (Task 3). A new dataset with 1000 whole scanned receipt images and annotations is created for the competition. In this report we will presents the motivation, competition datasets, task definition, evaluation protocol, submission statistics, performance of submitted methods and results analysis.

Xiaosha Chen, Supeng Leng, Jianhua He et al.

Research on the sixth generation cellular networks (6G) is gaining huge momentum to achieve ubiquitous wireless connectivity. Connected autonomous driving (CAV) is a critical vertical envisioned for 6G, holding great potentials of improving road safety, road and energy efficiency. However the stringent service requirements of CAV applications on reliability, latency and high speed communications will present big challenges to 6G networks. New channel access algorithms and intelligent control schemes for connected vehicles are needed for 6G supported CAV. In this paper, we investigated 6G supported cooperative driving, which is an advanced driving mode through information sharing and driving coordination. Firstly we quantify the delay upper bounds of 6G vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications with hybrid communication and channel access technologies. A deep learning neural network is developed and trained for fast computation of the delay bounds in real time operations. Then, an intelligent strategy is designed to control the inter-vehicle distance for cooperative autonomous driving. Furthermore, we propose a Markov Chain based algorithm to predict the parameters of the system states, and also a safe distance mapping method to enable smooth vehicular speed changes. The proposed algorithms are implemented in the AirSim autonomous driving platform. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms are effective and robust with safe and stable cooperative autonomous driving, which greatly improve the road safety, capacity and efficiency.

J. Tu, C. Chen, X. Huang et al.

Vehicle re-identification (re-ID) aims to discover and match the target vehicles from a gallery image set taken by different cameras on a wide range of road networks. It is crucial for lots of applications such as security surveillance and traffic management. The remarkably similar appearances of distinct vehicles and the significant changes of viewpoints and illumination conditions take grand challenges to vehicle re-ID. Conventional solutions focus on designing global visual appearances without sufficient consideration of vehicles' spatiotamporal relationships in different images. In this paper, we propose a novel discriminative feature representation with spatiotemporal clues (DFR-ST) for vehicle re-ID. It is capable of building robust features in the embedding space by involving appearance and spatio-temporal information. Based on this multi-modal information, the proposed DFR-ST constructs an appearance model for a multi-grained visual representation by a two-stream architecture and a spatio-temporal metric to provide complementary information. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate DFR-ST outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, which validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.