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Anh Nguyen

Publications and source records attributed to Anh Nguyen.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

Reducing Non-IID Effects in Federated Autonomous Driving with Contrastive Divergence Loss

Federated learning has been widely applied in autonomous driving since it enables training a learning model among vehicles without sharing users' data. However, data from autonomous vehicles usually suffer from the non-independent-and-identically-distributed (non-IID) problem, which may cause negative effects on the convergence of the learning process. In this paper, we propose a new contrastive divergence loss to address the non-IID problem in autonomous driving by reducing the impact of divergence factors from transmitted models during the local learning process of each silo. We also analyze the effects of contrastive divergence in various autonomous driving scenarios, under multiple network infrastructures, and with different centralized/distributed learning schemes. Our intensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our proposed contrastive divergence loss significantly improves the performance over current state-of-the-art approaches.

cs.RO↗

ImageNet-Hard: The Hardest Images Remaining from a Study of the Power of Zoom and Spatial Biases in Image Classification

Image classifiers are information-discarding machines, by design. Yet, how these models discard information remains mysterious. We hypothesize that one way for image classifiers to reach high accuracy is to first zoom to the most discriminative region in the image and then extract features from there to predict image labels, discarding the rest of the image. Studying six popular networks ranging from AlexNet to CLIP, we find that proper framing of the input image can lead to the correct classification of 98.91% of ImageNet images. Furthermore, we uncover positional biases in various datasets, especially a strong center bias in two popular datasets: ImageNet-A and ObjectNet. Finally, leveraging our insights into the potential of zooming, we propose a test-time augmentation (TTA) technique that improves classification accuracy by forcing models to explicitly perform zoom-in operations before making predictions. Our method is more interpretable, accurate, and faster than MEMO, a state-of-the-art (SOTA) TTA method. We introduce ImageNet-Hard, a new benchmark that challenges SOTA classifiers including large vision-language models even when optimal zooming is allowed.

cs.CV↗

Inverse Image Frequency for Long-tailed Image Recognition

The long-tailed distribution is a common phenomenon in the real world. Extracted large scale image datasets inevitably demonstrate the long-tailed property and models trained with imbalanced data can obtain high performance for the over-represented categories, but struggle for the under-represented categories, leading to biased predictions and performance degradation. To address this challenge, we propose a novel de-biasing method named Inverse Image Frequency (IIF). IIF is a multiplicative margin adjustment transformation of the logits in the classification layer of a convolutional neural network. Our method achieves stronger performance than similar works and it is especially useful for downstream tasks such as long-tailed instance segmentation as it produces fewer false positive detections. Our extensive experiments show that IIF surpasses the state of the art on many long-tailed benchmarks such as ImageNet-LT, CIFAR-LT, Places-LT and LVIS, reaching 55.8% top-1 accuracy with ResNet50 on ImageNet-LT and 26.2% segmentation AP with MaskRCNN on LVIS. Code available at https://github.com/kostas1515/iif

cs.CV↗

Open-Fusion: Real-time Open-Vocabulary 3D Mapping and Queryable Scene Representation

Precise 3D environmental mapping is pivotal in robotics. Existing methods often rely on predefined concepts during training or are time-intensive when generating semantic maps. This paper presents Open-Fusion, a groundbreaking approach for real-time open-vocabulary 3D mapping and queryable scene representation using RGB-D data. Open-Fusion harnesses the power of a pre-trained vision-language foundation model (VLFM) for open-set semantic comprehension and employs the Truncated Signed Distance Function (TSDF) for swift 3D scene reconstruction. By leveraging the VLFM, we extract region-based embeddings and their associated confidence maps. These are then integrated with 3D knowledge from TSDF using an enhanced Hungarian-based feature-matching mechanism. Notably, Open-Fusion delivers outstanding annotation-free 3D segmentation for open-vocabulary without necessitating additional 3D training. Benchmark tests on the ScanNet dataset against leading zero-shot methods highlight Open-Fusion's superiority. Furthermore, it seamlessly combines the strengths of region-based VLFM and TSDF, facilitating real-time 3D scene comprehension that includes object concepts and open-world semantics. We encourage the readers to view the demos on our project page: https://uark-aicv.github.io/OpenFusion

cs.CV↗

Learning to Terminate in Object Navigation

This paper tackles the critical challenge of object navigation in autonomous navigation systems, particularly focusing on the problem of target approach and episode termination in environments with long optimal episode length in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based methods. While effective in environment exploration and object localization, conventional DRL methods often struggle with optimal path planning and termination recognition due to a lack of depth information. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel approach, namely the Depth-Inference Termination Agent (DITA), which incorporates a supervised model called the Judge Model to implicitly infer object-wise depth and decide termination jointly with reinforcement learning. We train our judge model along with reinforcement learning in parallel and supervise the former efficiently by reward signal. Our evaluation shows the method is demonstrating superior performance, we achieve a 9.3% gain on success rate than our baseline method across all room types and gain 51.2% improvements on long episodes environment while maintaining slightly better Success Weighted by Path Length (SPL). Code and resources, visualization are available at: https://github.com/HuskyKingdom/DITA_acml2023

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Language-Conditioned Affordance-Pose Detection in 3D Point Clouds

Affordance detection and pose estimation are of great importance in many robotic applications. Their combination helps the robot gain an enhanced manipulation capability, in which the generated pose can facilitate the corresponding affordance task. Previous methods for affodance-pose joint learning are limited to a predefined set of affordances, thus limiting the adaptability of robots in real-world environments. In this paper, we propose a new method for language-conditioned affordance-pose joint learning in 3D point clouds. Given a 3D point cloud object, our method detects the affordance region and generates appropriate 6-DoF poses for any unconstrained affordance label. Our method consists of an open-vocabulary affordance detection branch and a language-guided diffusion model that generates 6-DoF poses based on the affordance text. We also introduce a new high-quality dataset for the task of language-driven affordance-pose joint learning. Intensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method works effectively on a wide range of open-vocabulary affordances and outperforms other baselines by a large margin. In addition, we illustrate the usefulness of our method in real-world robotic applications. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://3DAPNet.github.io

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Open-Vocabulary Affordance Detection using Knowledge Distillation and Text-Point Correlation

Affordance detection presents intricate challenges and has a wide range of robotic applications. Previous works have faced limitations such as the complexities of 3D object shapes, the wide range of potential affordances on real-world objects, and the lack of open-vocabulary support for affordance understanding. In this paper, we introduce a new open-vocabulary affordance detection method in 3D point clouds, leveraging knowledge distillation and text-point correlation. Our approach employs pre-trained 3D models through knowledge distillation to enhance feature extraction and semantic understanding in 3D point clouds. We further introduce a new text-point correlation method to learn the semantic links between point cloud features and open-vocabulary labels. The intensive experiments show that our approach outperforms previous works and adapts to new affordance labels and unseen objects. Notably, our method achieves the improvement of 7.96% mIOU score compared to the baselines. Furthermore, it offers real-time inference which is well-suitable for robotic manipulation applications.

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Grasp-Anything: Large-scale Grasp Dataset from Foundation Models

Foundation models such as ChatGPT have made significant strides in robotic tasks due to their universal representation of real-world domains. In this paper, we leverage foundation models to tackle grasp detection, a persistent challenge in robotics with broad industrial applications. Despite numerous grasp datasets, their object diversity remains limited compared to real-world figures. Fortunately, foundation models possess an extensive repository of real-world knowledge, including objects we encounter in our daily lives. As a consequence, a promising solution to the limited representation in previous grasp datasets is to harness the universal knowledge embedded in these foundation models. We present Grasp-Anything, a new large-scale grasp dataset synthesized from foundation models to implement this solution. Grasp-Anything excels in diversity and magnitude, boasting 1M samples with text descriptions and more than 3M objects, surpassing prior datasets. Empirically, we show that Grasp-Anything successfully facilitates zero-shot grasp detection on vision-based tasks and real-world robotic experiments. Our dataset and code are available at https://grasp-anything-2023.github.io.

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Visual correspondence-based explanations improve AI robustness and human-AI team accuracy

Explaining artificial intelligence (AI) predictions is increasingly important and even imperative in many high-stakes applications where humans are the ultimate decision-makers. In this work, we propose two novel architectures of self-interpretable image classifiers that first explain, and then predict (as opposed to post-hoc explanations) by harnessing the visual correspondences between a query image and exemplars. Our models consistently improve (by 1 to 4 points) on out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets while performing marginally worse (by 1 to 2 points) on in-distribution tests than ResNet-50 and a $k$-nearest neighbor classifier (kNN). Via a large-scale, human study on ImageNet and CUB, our correspondence-based explanations are found to be more useful to users than kNN explanations. Our explanations help users more accurately reject AI's wrong decisions than all other tested methods. Interestingly, for the first time, we show that it is possible to achieve complementary human-AI team accuracy (i.e., that is higher than either AI-alone or human-alone), in ImageNet and CUB image classification tasks.

cs.CV↗

Reducing Training Time in Cross-Silo Federated Learning using Multigraph Topology

Federated learning is an active research topic since it enables several participants to jointly train a model without sharing local data. Currently, cross-silo federated learning is a popular training setting that utilizes a few hundred reliable data silos with high-speed access links to training a model. While this approach has been widely applied in real-world scenarios, designing a robust topology to reduce the training time remains an open problem. In this paper, we present a new multigraph topology for cross-silo federated learning. We first construct the multigraph using the overlay graph. We then parse this multigraph into different simple graphs with isolated nodes. The existence of isolated nodes allows us to perform model aggregation without waiting for other nodes, hence effectively reducing the training time. Intensive experiments on three public datasets show that our proposed method significantly reduces the training time compared with recent state-of-the-art topologies while maintaining the accuracy of the learned model. Our code can be found at https://github.com/aioz-ai/MultigraphFL

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CathSim: An Open-source Simulator for Endovascular Intervention

Autonomous robots in endovascular operations have the potential to navigate circulatory systems safely and reliably while decreasing the susceptibility to human errors. However, there are numerous challenges involved with the process of training such robots, such as long training duration and safety issues arising from the interaction between the catheter and the aorta. Recently, endovascular simulators have been employed for medical training but generally do not conform to autonomous catheterization. Furthermore, most current simulators are closed-source, which hinders the collaborative development of safe and reliable autonomous systems. In this work, we introduce CathSim, an open-source simulation environment that accelerates the development of machine learning algorithms for autonomous endovascular navigation. We first simulate the high-fidelity catheter and aorta with a state-of-the-art endovascular robot. We then provide the capability of real-time force sensing between the catheter and the aorta in simulation. Furthermore, we validate our simulator by conducting two different catheterization tasks using two popular reinforcement learning algorithms. The experimental results show that our open-source simulator can mimic the behaviour of real-world endovascular robots and facilitate the development of different autonomous catheterization tasks. Our simulator is publicly available at https://github.com/robotvisionlabs/cathsim.

cs.RO↗

Open-Vocabulary Affordance Detection in 3D Point Clouds

Affordance detection is a challenging problem with a wide variety of robotic applications. Traditional affordance detection methods are limited to a predefined set of affordance labels, hence potentially restricting the adaptability of intelligent robots in complex and dynamic environments. In this paper, we present the Open-Vocabulary Affordance Detection (OpenAD) method, which is capable of detecting an unbounded number of affordances in 3D point clouds. By simultaneously learning the affordance text and the point feature, OpenAD successfully exploits the semantic relationships between affordances. Therefore, our proposed method enables zero-shot detection and can be able to detect previously unseen affordances without a single annotation example. Intensive experimental results show that OpenAD works effectively on a wide range of affordance detection setups and outperforms other baselines by a large margin. Additionally, we demonstrate the practicality of the proposed OpenAD in real-world robotic applications with a fast inference speed (~100ms). Our project is available at https://openad2023.github.io.

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Detecting the Sensing Area of A Laparoscopic Probe in Minimally Invasive Cancer Surgery

In surgical oncology, it is challenging for surgeons to identify lymph nodes and completely resect cancer even with pre-operative imaging systems like PET and CT, because of the lack of reliable intraoperative visualization tools. Endoscopic radio-guided cancer detection and resection has recently been evaluated whereby a novel tethered laparoscopic gamma detector is used to localize a preoperatively injected radiotracer. This can both enhance the endoscopic imaging and complement preoperative nuclear imaging data. However, gamma activity visualization is challenging to present to the operator because the probe is non-imaging and it does not visibly indicate the activity origination on the tissue surface. Initial failed attempts used segmentation or geometric methods, but led to the discovery that it could be resolved by leveraging high-dimensional image features and probe position information. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this solution, we designed and implemented a simple regression network that successfully addressed the problem. To further validate the proposed solution, we acquired and publicly released two datasets captured using a custom-designed, portable stereo laparoscope system. Through intensive experimentation, we demonstrated that our method can successfully and effectively detect the sensing area, establishing a new performance benchmark. Code and data are available at https://github.com/br0202/Sensing_area_detection.git

eess.IV↗

Self-Supervised Depth Estimation in Laparoscopic Image using 3D Geometric Consistency

Depth estimation is a crucial step for image-guided intervention in robotic surgery and laparoscopic imaging system. Since per-pixel depth ground truth is difficult to acquire for laparoscopic image data, it is rarely possible to apply supervised depth estimation to surgical applications. As an alternative, self-supervised methods have been introduced to train depth estimators using only synchronized stereo image pairs. However, most recent work focused on the left-right consistency in 2D and ignored valuable inherent 3D information on the object in real world coordinates, meaning that the left-right 3D geometric structural consistency is not fully utilized. To overcome this limitation, we present M3Depth, a self-supervised depth estimator to leverage 3D geometric structural information hidden in stereo pairs while keeping monocular inference. The method also removes the influence of border regions unseen in at least one of the stereo images via masking, to enhance the correspondences between left and right images in overlapping areas. Intensive experiments show that our method outperforms previous self-supervised approaches on both a public dataset and a newly acquired dataset by a large margin, indicating a good generalization across different samples and laparoscopes. Code and data are available at https://github.com/br0202/M3Depth.

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A Client-server Deep Federated Learning for Cross-domain Surgical Image Segmentation

This paper presents a solution to the cross-domain adaptation problem for 2D surgical image segmentation, explicitly considering the privacy protection of distributed datasets belonging to different centers. Deep learning architectures in medical image analysis necessitate extensive training data for better generalization. However, obtaining sufficient diagnostic and surgical data is still challenging, mainly due to the inherent cost of data curation and the need of experts for data annotation. Moreover, increased privacy and legal compliance concerns can make data sharing across clinical sites or regions difficult. Another ubiquitous challenge the medical datasets face is inevitable domain shifts among the collected data at the different centers. To this end, we propose a Client-server deep federated architecture for cross-domain adaptation. A server hosts a set of immutable parameters common to both the source and target domains. The clients consist of the respective domain-specific parameters and make requests to the server while learning their parameters and inferencing. We evaluate our framework in two benchmark datasets, demonstrating applicability in computer-assisted interventions for endoscopic polyp segmentation and diagnostic skin lesion detection and analysis. Our extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared to competitive baseline and state-of-the-art methods. Codes are available at: https://github.com/thetna/distributed-da

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How explainable are adversarially-robust CNNs?

Three important criteria of existing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are (1) test-set accuracy; (2) out-of-distribution accuracy; and (3) explainability. While these criteria have been studied independently, their relationship is unknown. For example, do CNNs that have a stronger out-of-distribution performance have also stronger explainability? Furthermore, most prior feature-importance studies only evaluate methods on 2-3 common vanilla ImageNet-trained CNNs, leaving it unknown how these methods generalize to CNNs of other architectures and training algorithms. Here, we perform the first, large-scale evaluation of the relations of the three criteria using 9 feature-importance methods and 12 ImageNet-trained CNNs that are of 3 training algorithms and 5 CNN architectures. We find several important insights and recommendations for ML practitioners. First, adversarially robust CNNs have a higher explainability score on gradient-based attribution methods (but not CAM-based or perturbation-based methods). Second, AdvProp models, despite being highly accurate more than both vanilla and robust models alone, are not superior in explainability. Third, among 9 feature attribution methods tested, GradCAM and RISE are consistently the best methods. Fourth, Insertion and Deletion are biased towards vanilla and robust models respectively, due to their strong correlation with the confidence score distributions of a CNN. Fifth, we did not find a single CNN to be the best in all three criteria, which interestingly suggests that CNNs are harder to interpret as they become more accurate.

cs.CV↗

Self-Supervised Learning for Point Clouds Data: A Survey

3D point clouds are a crucial type of data collected by LiDAR sensors and widely used in transportation applications due to its concise descriptions and accurate localization. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in processing large amount of disordered and sparse 3D point clouds, especially in various computer vision tasks, such as pedestrian detection and vehicle recognition. Among all the learning paradigms, Self-Supervised Learning (SSL), an unsupervised training paradigm that mines effective information from the data itself, is considered as an essential solution to solve the time-consuming and labor-intensive data labelling problems via smart pre-training task design. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of recent advances on SSL for point clouds. We first present an innovative taxonomy, categorizing the existing SSL methods into four broad categories based on the pretexts' characteristics. Under each category, we then further categorize the methods into more fine-grained groups and summarize the strength and limitations of the representative methods. We also compare the performance of the notable SSL methods in literature on multiple downstream tasks on benchmark datasets both quantitatively and qualitatively. Finally, we propose a number of future research directions based on the identified limitations of existing SSL research on point clouds.

cs.CV↗

A first Kronecker limit formula for Kleinian groups

We prove a first Kronecker limit formula for cofinite discrete subgroups of SL$(2,\mathbb{C})$, also called Kleinian groups, generalizing a method of Goldstein over SL$(2,\mathbb R)$. The proof uses the Fourier expansion of Eisenstein series, leading to an analogue of the logarithm of the Dedekind eta function, and whose transformation law produces a function analogous to one related to Dedekind sums. We derive several basic properties of this new function.

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