论文检索

Aakash, Indranil Saha

We study a variant of the multi-robot goal assignment problem where a unique goal to each robot needs to be assigned while minimizing the largest cost of movement among the robots, called makespan. A significant step in solving this problem is to find the cost associated with the robot-goal pairs, which requires solving a complex path planning problem. We present OM, a scalable optimal algorithm that solves the multi-robot goal assignment problem by computing the paths for a significantly less number of robot-goal pairs compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms, leading to a computationally superior mechanism to solve the problem. We extensively evaluate our algorithm for hundreds of robots on randomly generated and standard workspaces. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves a noticeable speedup over two state-of-the-art baseline algorithms.

Qiaoyun Wu, Quanxiao Zhang, Chunyu Tan, Yun Zhou, Changyin Sun

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have revolutionized neural learning and are making remarkable strides in image analysis and robot control tasks with ultra-low power consumption advantages. Inspired by this success, we investigate the application of spiking neural networks to 3D point cloud processing. We present a point-to-spike residual learning network for point cloud classification, which operates on points with binary spikes rather than floating-point numbers. Specifically, we first design a spatial-aware kernel point spiking neuron to relate spiking generation to point position in 3D space. On this basis, we then design a 3D spiking residual block for effective feature learning based on spike sequences. By stacking the 3D spiking residual blocks, we build the point-to-spike residual classification network, which achieves low computation cost and low accuracy loss on two benchmark datasets, ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN. Moreover, the classifier strikes a good balance between classification accuracy and biological characteristics, allowing us to explore the deployment of 3D processing to neuromorphic chips for developing energy-efficient 3D robotic perception systems.

Youhong Wang, Yunji Liang, Hao Xu, Shaohui Jiao, Hongkai Yu

Recently, self-supervised monocular depth estimation has gained popularity with numerous applications in autonomous driving and robotics. However, existing solutions primarily seek to estimate depth from immediate visual features, and struggle to recover fine-grained scene details. In this paper, we introduce SQLdepth, a novel approach that can effectively learn fine-grained scene structure priors from ego-motion. In SQLdepth, we propose a novel Self Query Layer (SQL) to build a self-cost volume and infer depth from it, rather than inferring depth from feature maps. We show that, the self-cost volume is an effective inductive bias for geometry learning, which implicitly models the single-frame scene geometry, with each slice of it indicating a relative distance map between points and objects in a latent space. Experimental results on KITTI and Cityscapes show that our method attains remarkable state-of-the-art performance, and showcases computational efficiency, reduced training complexity, and the ability to recover fine-grained scene details. Moreover, the self-matching-oriented relative distance querying in SQL improves the robustness and zero-shot generalization capability of SQLdepth. Code is available at https://github.com/hisfog/SfMNeXt-Impl.

Shuo Wang, Zhihao Wu, Xiaobo Hu, Jinwen Wang, Youfang Lin, Kai Lv

In visual Reinforcement Learning (RL), the challenge of generalization to new environments is paramount. This study pioneers a theoretical analysis of visual RL generalization, establishing an upper bound on the generalization objective, encompassing policy divergence and Bellman error components. Motivated by this analysis, we propose maintaining the cross-domain consistency for each policy in the policy space, which can reduce the divergence of the learned policy during the test. In practice, we introduce the Truncated Return Prediction (TRP) task, promoting cross-domain policy consistency by predicting truncated returns of historical trajectories. Moreover, we also propose a Transformer-based predictor for this auxiliary task. Extensive experiments on DeepMind Control Suite and Robotic Manipulation tasks demonstrate that TRP achieves state-of-the-art generalization performance. We further demonstrate that TRP outperforms previous methods in terms of sample efficiency during training.

Hongyu Wang, Xiaotao Liu, Yifan Li, Meng Sun, Dian Yuan, Jing Liu

RGBT tracking has been widely used in various fields such as robotics, surveillance processing, and autonomous driving. Existing RGBT trackers fully explore the spatial information between the template and the search region and locate the target based on the appearance matching results. However, these RGBT trackers have very limited exploitation of temporal information, either ignoring temporal information or exploiting it through online sampling and training. The former struggles to cope with the object state changes, while the latter neglects the correlation between spatial and temporal information. To alleviate these limitations, we propose a novel Temporal Adaptive RGBT Tracking framework, named as TATrack. TATrack has a spatio-temporal two-stream structure and captures temporal information by an online updated template, where the two-stream structure refers to the multi-modal feature extraction and cross-modal interaction for the initial template and the online update template respectively. TATrack contributes to comprehensively exploit spatio-temporal information and multi-modal information for target localization. In addition, we design a spatio-temporal interaction (STI) mechanism that bridges two branches and enables cross-modal interaction to span longer time scales. Extensive experiments on three popular RGBT tracking benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, while running at real-time speed.

Haziq Razali, Yiannis Demiris

Learning to forecast bimanual object manipulation sequences from unimanual observations has broad applications in assistive robots and augmented reality. This challenging task requires us to first infer motion from the missing arm and the object it would have been manipulating were the person bimanual, then forecast the human and object motion while maintaining hand-object contact during manipulation. Previous attempts model the hand-object interactions only implicitly, and thus tend to produce unrealistic motion where the objects float in air. We address this with a novel neural network that (i) identifies and forecasts the pose for only the objects undergoing motion through an object motion module and (ii) refines human pose predictions by encouraging hand-object contact during manipulation through an ensemble of human pose predictors. The components are also designed to be generic enough for use in both unimanual and bimanual contexts. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art pose forecasting methods on bimanual manipulation datasets.

Changsong Pang, Xieyuanli Chen, Yimin Liu, Huimin Lu, Yuwei Cheng

Moving object segmentation (MOS) and Ego velocity estimation (EVE) are vital capabilities for mobile systems to achieve full autonomy. Several approaches have attempted to achieve MOSEVE using a LiDAR sensor. However, LiDAR sensors are typically expensive and susceptible to adverse weather conditions. Instead, millimeter-wave radar (MWR) has gained popularity in robotics and autonomous driving for real applications due to its cost-effectiveness and resilience to bad weather. Nonetheless, publicly available MOSEVE datasets and approaches using radar data are limited. Some existing methods adopt point convolutional networks from LiDAR-based approaches, ignoring the specific artifacts and the valuable radial velocity information of radar measurements, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel transformer network that effectively addresses the sparsity and noise issues and leverages the radial velocity measurements of radar points using our devised radar self- and cross-attention mechanisms. Based on that, our method achieves accurate EVE of the robot and performs MOS using only radar data simultaneously. To thoroughly evaluate the MOSEVE performance of our method, we annotated the radar points in the public View-of-Delft (VoD) dataset and additionally constructed a new radar dataset in various environments. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/ORCAUboat/RadarMOSEVE.

Zhipeng Luo, Gongjie Zhang, Changqing Zhou, Zhonghua Wu, Qingyi Tao, Lewei Lu, Shijian Lu

The task of 3D single object tracking (SOT) with LiDAR point clouds is crucial for various applications, such as autonomous driving and robotics. However, existing approaches have primarily relied on appearance matching or motion modeling within only two successive frames, thereby overlooking the long-range continuous motion property of objects in 3D space. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel approach that views each tracklet as a continuous stream: at each timestamp, only the current frame is fed into the network to interact with multi-frame historical features stored in a memory bank, enabling efficient exploitation of sequential information. To achieve effective cross-frame message passing, a hybrid attention mechanism is designed to account for both long-range relation modeling and local geometric feature extraction. Furthermore, to enhance the utilization of multi-frame features for robust tracking, a contrastive sequence enhancement strategy is proposed, which uses ground truth tracklets to augment training sequences and promote discrimination against false positives in a contrastive manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art method by significant margins on multiple benchmarks.

Ziyang Lu, Yunqiang Pei, Guoqing Wang, Peiwei Li, Yang Yang, Yinjie Lei, Heng Tao Shen

Aiming to link natural language descriptions to specific regions in a 3D scene represented as 3D point clouds, 3D visual grounding is a very fundamental task for human-robot interaction. The recognition errors can significantly impact the overall accuracy and then degrade the operation of AI systems. Despite their effectiveness, existing methods suffer from the difficulty of low recognition accuracy in cases of multiple adjacent objects with similar appearance. To address this issue, this work intuitively introduces the human-robot interaction as a cue to facilitate the development of 3D visual grounding. Specifically, a new task termed Embodied Reference Understanding (ERU) is first designed for this concern. Then a new dataset called ScanERU is constructed to evaluate the effectiveness of this idea. Different from existing datasets, our ScanERU dataset is the first to cover semi-synthetic scene integration with textual, real-world visual, and synthetic gestural information. Additionally, this paper formulates a heuristic framework based on attention mechanisms and human body movements to enlighten the research of ERU. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, especially in the recognition of multiple identical objects. Our codes and dataset are available in the ScanERU repository.

Liu Liu, Anran Huang, Qi Wu, Dan Guo, Xun Yang, Meng Wang

Our life is populated with articulated objects. Current category-level articulation estimation works largely focus on predicting part-level 6D poses on static point cloud observations. In this paper, we tackle the problem of category-level online robust and real-time 6D pose tracking of articulated objects, where we propose KPA-Tracker, a novel 3D KeyPoint based Articulated object pose Tracker. Given an RGB-D image or a partial point cloud at the current frame as well as the estimated per-part 6D poses from the last frame, our KPA-Tracker can effectively update the poses with learned 3D keypoints between the adjacent frames. Specifically, we first canonicalize the input point cloud and formulate the pose tracking as an inter-frame pose increment estimation task. To learn consistent and separate 3D keypoints for every rigid part, we build KPA-Gen that outputs the high-quality ordered 3D keypoints in an unsupervised manner. During pose tracking on the whole video, we further propose a keypoint-based articulation tracking algorithm that mines keyframes as reference for accurate pose updating. We provide extensive experiments on validating our KPA-Tracker on various datasets ranging from synthetic point cloud observation to real-world scenarios, which demonstrates the superior performance and robustness of the KPA-Tracker. We believe that our work has the potential to be applied in many fields including robotics, embodied intelligence and augmented reality. All the datasets and codes are available at https://github.com/hhhhhar/KPA-Tracker.

Daizong Liu, Wei Hu

Deep learning models for point clouds have shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which have received increasing attention in various safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and surveillance. Existing 3D attack methods generally employ global distance losses to implicitly constrain the point-wise perturbations for optimization. However, these simple losses are quite difficult to accurately measure and restrict the proper 3D geometry as point clouds are highly structured. Although few recent works try to exploit additional shape-aware surface knowledge to globally constrain the point position, they still fail to preserve the detailed point-to-point geometric dependency in different local regions. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel Multi-grained Geometry-aware Attack (MGA), which explicitly captures the local topology characteristics in different 3D regions for adversarial constraint. Specifically, we first develop multi-scale spectral local filter banks adapting to different 3D object shapes to explore potential geometric structures in local regions. Considering that objects may contain complex geometries, we then extend each filter bank into multi-layer ones to gradually capture the topology contexts of the same region in a coarse-to-fine manner. Hence, the focused local geometric structures will be highlighted in the coefficients calculated by the filtering process. At last, by restricting these coefficients between benign and adversarial samples, our MGA is able to properly measure and preserve the detailed geometry contexts in the whole 3D object with trivial perturbations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our attack can achieve superior performance on various 3D classification models, with satisfying adversarial imperceptibility and strong resistance to different defense methods.

Yuze Hao, Jianrong Zhang, Tao Zhuo, Fuan Wen, Hehe Fan

Hands are the main medium when people interact with the world. Generating proper 3D motion for hand-object interaction is vital for applications such as virtual reality and robotics. Although grasp tracking or object manipulation synthesis can produce coarse hand motion, this kind of motion is inevitably noisy and full of jitter. To address this problem, we propose a data-driven method for coarse motion refinement. First, we design a hand-centric representation to describe the dynamic spatial-temporal relation between hands and objects. Compared to the object-centric representation, our hand-centric representation is straightforward and does not require an ambiguous projection process that converts object-based prediction into hand motion. Second, to capture the dynamic clues of hand-object interaction, we propose a new architecture that models the spatial and temporal structure in a hierarchical manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms previous methods by a noticeable margin.

Shaoheng Fang, Zuhong Liu, Mingyu Wang, Chenxin Xu, Yiqi Zhong, Siheng Chen

Learning the dense bird's eye view (BEV) motion flow in a self-supervised manner is an emerging research for robotics and autonomous driving. Current self-supervised methods mainly rely on point correspondences between point clouds, which may introduce the problems of fake flow and inconsistency, hindering the model’s ability to learn accurate and realistic motion. In this paper, we introduce a novel cross-modality self-supervised training framework that effectively addresses these issues by leveraging multi-modality data to obtain supervision signals. We design three innovative supervision signals to preserve the inherent properties of scene motion, including the masked Chamfer distance loss, the piecewise rigidity loss, and the temporal consistency loss. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed self-supervised framework outperforms all previous self-supervision methods for the motion prediction task.

Yue-Jiang Dong, Yuan-Chen Guo, Ying-Tian Liu, Fang-Lue Zhang, Song-Hai Zhang

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation is of significant importance with applications spanning across autonomous driving and robotics. However, the reliance on self-supervision introduces a strong static-scene assumption, thereby posing challenges in achieving optimal performance in dynamic scenes, which are prevalent in most real-world situations. To address these issues, we propose PPEA-Depth, a Progressive Parameter-Efficient Adaptation approach to transfer a pre-trained image model for self-supervised depth estimation. The training comprises two sequential stages: an initial phase trained on a dataset primarily composed of static scenes, succeeded by an expansion to more intricate datasets involving dynamic scenes. To facilitate this process, we design compact encoder and decoder adapters to enable parameter-efficient tuning, allowing the network to adapt effectively. They not only uphold generalized patterns from pre-trained image models but also retain knowledge gained from the preceding phase into the subsequent one. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PPEA-Depth achieves state-of-the-art performance on KITTI, CityScapes and DDAD datasets.

Junseok Park, Yoonsung Kim, Hee bin Yoo, Min Whoo Lee, Kibeom Kim, Won-Seok Choi, Minsu Lee, Byoung-Tak Zhang

Toddlers evolve from free exploration with sparse feedback to exploiting prior experiences for goal-directed learning with denser rewards. Drawing inspiration from this Toddler-Inspired Reward Transition, we set out to explore the implications of varying reward transitions when incorporated into Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks. Central to our inquiry is the transition from sparse to potential-based dense rewards, which share optimal strategies regardless of reward changes. Through various experiments, including those in egocentric navigation and robotic arm manipulation tasks, we found that proper reward transitions significantly influence sample efficiency and success rates. Of particular note is the efficacy of the toddler-inspired Sparse-to-Dense (S2D) transition. Beyond these performance metrics, using Cross-Density Visualizer technique, we observed that transitions, especially the S2D, smooth the policy loss landscape, promoting wide minima that enhance generalization in RL models.

Zhenyu Lou, Qiongjie Cui, Haofan Wang, Xu Tang, Hong Zhou

Predicting future human pose is a fundamental application for machine intelligence which drives robots to plan their behavior and paths ahead of time to seamlessly accomplish human-robot collaboration in real-world 3D scenarios. Despite encouraging results existing approaches rarely consider the effects of the external scene on the motion sequence leading to pronounced artifacts and physical implausibilities in the predictions. To address this limitation this work introduces a novel multi-modal sense-informed motion prediction approach which conditions high-fidelity generation on two modal information: external 3D scene and internal human gaze and is able to recognize their salience for future human activity. Furthermore the gaze information is regarded as the human intention and combined with both motion and scene features we construct a ternary intention-aware attention to supervise the generation to match where the human wants to reach. Meanwhile we introduce semantic coherence-aware attention to explicitly distinguish the salient point clouds and the underlying ones to ensure a reasonable interaction of the generated sequence with the 3D scene. On two real-world benchmarks the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance both in 3D human pose and trajectory prediction. More detailed results are available on the page: https://sites.google.com/view/cvpr2024sif3d.

Lei Fan, Mingfu Liang, Yunxuan Li, Gang Hua, Ying Wu

Active recognition enables robots to intelligently explore novel observations thereby acquiring more information while circumventing undesired viewing conditions. Recent approaches favor learning policies from simulated or collected data wherein appropriate actions are more frequently selected when the recognition is accurate. However most recognition modules are developed under the closed-world assumption which makes them ill-equipped to handle unexpected inputs such as the absence of the target object in the current observation. To address this issue we propose treating active recognition as a sequential evidence-gathering process providing by-step uncertainty quantification and reliable prediction under the evidence combination theory. Additionally the reward function developed in this paper effectively characterizes the merit of actions when operating in open-world environments. To evaluate the performance we collect a dataset from an indoor simulator encompassing various recognition challenges such as distance occlusion levels and visibility. Through a series of experiments on recognition and robustness analysis we demonstrate the necessity of introducing uncertainties to active recognition and the superior performance of the proposed method.

Yichao Liang, Kevin Ellis, João Henriques

Developing generalizable manipulation skills is a core challenge in embodied AI. This includes generalization across diverse task configurations encompassing variations in object shape density friction coefficient and external disturbances such as forces applied to the robot. Rapid Motor Adaptation (RMA) offers a promising solution to this challenge. It posits that essential hidden variables influencing an agent's task performance such as object mass and shape can be effectively inferred from the agent's action and proprioceptive history. Drawing inspiration from RMA in locomotion and in-hand rotation we use depth perception to develop agents tailored for rapid motor adaptation in a variety of manipulation tasks. We evaluated our agents on four challenging tasks from the Maniskill2 benchmark namely pick-and-place operations with hundreds of objects from the YCB and EGAD datasets peg insertion with precise position and orientation and operating a variety of faucets and handles with customized environment variations. Empirical results demonstrate that our agents surpass state-of-the-art methods like automatic domain randomization and vision-based policies obtaining better generalization performance and sample efficiency.

Zhihao Cao, Zidong Wang, Siwen Xie, Anji Liu, Lifeng Fan

Despite the significant demand for assistive technology among vulnerable groups (e.g. the elderly children and the disabled) in daily tasks research into advanced AI-driven assistive solutions that genuinely accommodate their diverse needs remains sparse. Traditional human-machine interaction tasks often require machines to simply help without nuanced consideration of human abilities and feelings such as their opportunity for practice and learning sense of self-improvement and self-esteem. Addressing this gap we define a pivotal and novel challenge Smart Help which aims to provide proactive yet adaptive support to human agents with diverse disabilities and dynamic goals in various tasks and environments. To establish this challenge we leverage AI2-THOR to build a new interactive 3D realistic household environment for the Smart Help task. We introduce an innovative opponent modeling module that provides a nuanced understanding of the main agent's capabilities and goals in order to optimize the assisting agent's helping policy. Rigorous experiments validate the efficacy of our model components and show the superiority of our holistic approach against established baselines. Our findings illustrate the potential of AI-imbued assistive robots in improving the well-being of vulnerable groups.

Jiasen Lu, Christopher Clark, Sangho Lee, Zichen Zhang, Savya Khosla, Ryan Marten, Derek Hoiem, Aniruddha Kembhavi

We present Unified-IO 2 a multimodal and multi-skill unified model capable of following novel instructions. Unified-IO 2 can use text images audio and/or videos as input and can generate text image or audio outputs which is accomplished in a unified way by tokenizing these different inputs and outputs into a shared semantic space that can then be processed by a single encoder-decoder transformer model. Unified-IO 2 is trained from scratch on a custom-built multimodal pre-training corpus and then learns an expansive set of skills through fine-tuning on over 120 datasets including datasets for segmentation object detection image editing audio localization video tracking embodied AI and 3D detection. To facilitate instruction-following we add prompts and other data augmentations to these tasks to allow Unified-IO 2 to generalize these skills to new tasks zero-shot. Unified-IO 2 is the first model to be trained on such a diverse and wide-reaching set of skills and unify three separate generation capabilities. Unified-IO 2 achieves state-of-the-art performance on the multi-task GRIT benchmark and achieves strong results on 30 diverse datasets including SEED-Bench image and video understanding TIFA image generation VQA 2.0 ScienceQA VIMA robotic manipulation VGG-Sound and Kinetics-Sounds and can perform unseen tasks and generate free-form responses. We release our model and code to facilitate future work.