We present a method for jointly training the estimation of depth, ego-motion, and a dense 3D translation field of objects relative to the scene, with monocular photometric consistency being the sole source of supervision. We show that this apparently heavily underdetermined problem can be regularized by imposing the following prior knowledge about 3D translation fields: they are sparse, since most of the scene is static, and they tend to be constant for rigid moving objects… We show that this regularization […]

Panoptic segmentation is posed as a new popular test-bed for the state-of-the-art holistic scene understanding methods with the requirement of simultaneously segmenting both foreground things and background stuff. The state-of-the-art panoptic segmentation network exhibits high structural complexity in different network components, i.e. backbone, proposal-based foreground branch, segmentation-based background branch, and feature fusion module across branches, which heavily relies on expert knowledge and tedious trials… In this work, we propose an efficient, cooperative and highly automated framework to simultaneously search for […]

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in recent years. Three most common applications include node classification, link prediction, and graph classification… While there is rich literature on node classification and graph classification, GNNs for link prediction is relatively less studied and less understood. Two representative classes of methods exist: GAE and SEAL. GAE (Graph Autoencoder) first uses a GNN to learn node embeddings for all nodes, and then aggregates the embeddings of the source and target nodes as […]

In recent years, distantly-supervised relation extraction has achieved a certain success by using deep neural networks. Distant Supervision (DS) can automatically generate large-scale annotated data by aligning entity pairs from Knowledge Bases (KB) to sentences… However, these DS-generated datasets inevitably have wrong labels that result in incorrect evaluation scores during testing, which may mislead the researchers. To solve this problem, we build a new dataset NYTH, where we use the DS-generated data as training data and hire annotators to label […]

Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is a popular tool for classification and dimension reduction. Limited by its linear form and the underlying Gaussian assumption, however, LDA is not applicable in situations where the data distribution is complex… Recently, we proposed a discriminative normalization flow (DNF) model. In this study, we reinterpret DNF as a deep generative LDA model, and study its properties in representing complex data. We conducted a simulation experiment and a speaker recognition experiment. The results show that DNF […]

Deep speaker embedding represents the state-of-the-art technique for speaker recognition. A key problem with this approach is that the resulting deep speaker vectors tend to be irregularly distributed… In previous research, we proposed a deep normalization approach based on a new discriminative normalization flow (DNF) model, by which the distributions of individual speakers are arguably transformed to homogeneous Gaussians. This normalization was demonstrated to be effective, but despite this remarkable success, we empirically found that the latent codes produced by […]

Object pose estimation enables robots to understand and interact with their environments. Training with synthetic data is necessary in order to adapt to novel situations… Unfortunately, pose estimation under domain shift, i.e., training on synthetic data and testing in the real world, is challenging. Deep learning-based approaches currently perform best when using encoder-decoder networks but typically do not generalize to new scenarios with different scene characteristics. We argue that patch-based approaches, instead of encoder-decoder networks, are more suited for synthetic-to-real […]

To accurately predict future positions of different agents in traffic scenarios is crucial for safely deploying intelligent autonomous systems in the real-world environment. However, it remains a challenge due to the behavior of a target agent being affected by other agents dynamically, and there being more than one socially possible paths the agent could take… In this paper, we propose a novel framework, named Dynamic Context Encoder Network (DCENet). In our framework, first, the spatial context between agents is explored […]

In this paper, with a view toward fast deployment of locomotion gaits in low-cost hardware, we use a linear policy for realizing end-foot trajectories in the quadruped robot, Stoch $2$. In particular, the parameters of the end-foot trajectories are shaped via a linear feedback policy that takes the torso orientation and the terrain slope as inputs… The corresponding desired joint angles are obtained via an inverse kinematics solver and tracked via a PID control law. Augmented Random Search, a model-free […]