Amirali Baniasadi

Samaneh Javadinia, Amirali Baniasadi

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have produced state-of-the-art results for image classification tasks. However, they are limited in their ability to handle rotational and viewpoint variations due to information loss in max-pooling layers. Capsule Networks (CapsNets) employ a computationally-expensive iterative process referred to as dynamic routing to address these issues. CapsNets, however, often fall short on complex datasets and require more computational resources than CNNs. To overcome these challenges, we introduce the Parallel Dynamic Routing CapsNet (PDR-CapsNet), a deeper and more energy-efficient alternative to CapsNet that offers superior performance, less energy consumption, and lower overfitting rates. By leveraging a parallelization strategy, PDR-CapsNet mitigates the computational complexity of CapsNet and increases throughput, efficiently using hardware resources. As a result, we achieve 83.55\% accuracy while requiring 87.26\% fewer parameters, 32.27\% and 47.40\% fewer MACs, and Flops, achieving 3x faster inference and 7.29J less energy consumption on a 2080Ti GPU with 11GB VRAM compared to CapsNet and for the CIFAR-10 dataset.

Pouya Shiri, Ramin Sharifi, Amirali Baniasadi

The basic computational unit in Capsule Network (CapsNet) is a capsule (vs. neurons in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)). A capsule is a set of neurons, which form a vector. CapsNet is used for supervised classification of data and has achieved state-of-the-art accuracy on MNIST digit recognition dataset, outperforming conventional CNNs in detecting overlapping digits. Moreover, CapsNet shows higher robustness towards affine transformation when compared to CNNs for MNIST datasets. One of the drawbacks of CapsNet, however, is slow training and testing. This can be a bottleneck for applications that require a fast network, especially during inference. In this work, we introduce Quick-CapsNet (QCN) as a fast alternative to CapsNet, which can be a starting point to develop CapsNet for fast real-time applications. QCN builds on producing a fewer number of capsules, which results in a faster network. QCN achieves this at the cost of marginal loss in accuracy. Inference is 5x faster on MNIST, F-MNIST, SVHN and Cifar-10 datasets. We also further enhanced QCN by employing a more powerful decoder instead of the default decoder to further improve QCN.

Reza Jalayer, Masoud Jalayer, Amirali Baniasadi

Sound source localization (SSL) adds a spatial dimension to auditory perception, allowing a system to pinpoint the origin of speech, machinery noise, warning tones, or other acoustic events, capabilities that facilitate robot navigation, human-machine dialogue, and condition monitoring. While existing surveys provide valuable historical context, they typically address general audio applications and do not fully account for robotic constraints or the latest advancements in deep learning. This review addresses these gaps by offering a robotics-focused synthesis, emphasizing recent progress in deep learning methodologies. We start by reviewing classical methods such as Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA), beamforming, Steered-Response Power (SRP), and subspace analysis. Subsequently, we delve into modern machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) approaches, discussing traditional ML and neural networks (NNs), convolutional neural networks (CNNs), convolutional recurrent neural networks (CRNNs), and emerging attention-based architectures. The data and training strategy that are the two cornerstones of DL-based SSL are explored. Studies are further categorized by robot types and application domains to facilitate researchers in identifying relevant work for their specific contexts. Finally, we highlight the current challenges in SSL works in general, regarding environmental robustness, sound source multiplicity, and specific implementation constraints in robotics, as well as data and learning strategies in DL-based SSL. Also, we sketch promising directions to offer an actionable roadmap toward robust, adaptable, efficient, and explainable DL-based SSL for next-generation robots.

Khaled A. Helal Kelany, Nikitas Dimopoulos, Clemens P. J. Adolphs et al.

The focus of this work is to explore the use of quantum annealing solvers for the problem of phase unwrapping of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Although solutions to this problem exist based on network programming, these techniques do not scale well to larger-sized images. Our approach involves formulating the problem as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problem, which can be solved using a quantum annealer. Given that present embodiments of quantum annealers remain limited in the number of qubits they possess, we decompose the problem into a set of subproblems that can be solved individually. These individual solutions are close to optimal up to an integer constant, with one constant per sub-image. In a second phase, these integer constants are determined as a solution to yet another QUBO problem. We test our approach with a variety of software-based QUBO solvers and on a variety of images, both synthetic and real. Additionally, we experiment using D-Wave Systems's quantum annealer, the D-Wave 2000Q. The software-based solvers obtain high-quality solutions comparable to state-of-the-art phase-unwrapping solvers. We are currently working on optimally mapping the problem onto the restricted topology of the quantum annealer to improve the quality of the solution.