LiOn-XA: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via LiDAR-Only Cross-Modal Adversarial Training

In this paper, we propose LiOn-XA, an unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) approach that combines LiDAR-Only Cross-Modal (X) learning with Adversarial training for 3D LiDAR point cloud semantic segmentation to bridge the domain gap arising from environmental and sensor setup changes. Unlike existing works that exploit multiple data modalities like point clouds and RGB image data, we address UDA in scenarios where RGB images might not be available and show that two distinct LiDAR data representations can learn from each other for UDA. More specifically, we leverage 3D voxelized point clouds to preserve important geometric structure in combination with 2D projection-based range images that provide information such as object orientations or surfaces. To further align the feature space between both domains, we apply adversarial training using both features and predictions of both 2D and 3D neural networks. Our experiments on 3 real-to-real adaptation scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving new state-of-the-art performance when compared to previous uni- and multi-model UDA methods. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/JensLe97/lion-xa.

Unsupervised Driving Event Discovery Based on Vehicle CAN-data

The data collected from a vehicle's Controller Area Network (CAN) can quickly exceed human analysis or annotation capabilities when considering fleets of vehicles, which stresses the importance of unsupervised machine learning methods. This work presents a simultaneous clustering and segmentation approach for vehicle CAN-data that identifies common driving events in an unsupervised manner. The approach builds on self-supervised learning (SSL) for multivariate time series to distinguish different driving events in the learned latent space. We evaluate our approach with a dataset of real Tesla Model 3 vehicle CAN-data and a two-hour driving session that we annotated with different driving events. With our approach, we evaluate the applicability of recent time series-related contrastive and generative SSL techniques to learn representations that distinguish driving events. Compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) generative SSL methods for driving event discovery, we find that contrastive learning approaches reach similar performance.

Unsupervised 4D LiDAR Moving Object Segmentation in Stationary Settings with Multivariate Occupancy Time Series

In this work, we address the problem of unsupervised moving object segmentation (MOS) in 4D LiDAR data recorded from a stationary sensor, where no ground truth annotations are involved. Deep learning-based state-of-the-art methods for LiDAR MOS strongly depend on annotated ground truth data, which is expensive to obtain and scarce in existence. To close this gap in the stationary setting, we propose a novel 4D LiDAR representation based on multivariate time series that relaxes the problem of unsupervised MOS to a time series clustering problem. More specifically, we propose modeling the change in occupancy of a voxel by a multivariate occupancy time series (MOTS), which captures spatio-temporal occupancy changes on the voxel level and its surrounding neighborhood. To perform unsupervised MOS, we train a neural network in a self-supervised manner to encode MOTS into voxel-level feature representations, which can be partitioned by a clustering algorithm into moving or stationary. Experiments on stationary scenes from the Raw KITTI dataset show that our fully unsupervised approach achieves performance that is comparable to that of supervised state-of-the-art approaches.

On computable abstractions (a conceptual introduction)

This paper introduces abstractions that are meaningful for computers and that can be built and used according to computers' own criteria, i.e., computable abstractions. It is analyzed how abstractions can be seen to serve as the building blocks for the creation of one own's understanding of things, which is essential in performing intellectual tasks. Thus, abstractional machines are defined, which following a mechanical process can, based on computable abstractions, build and use their own understanding of things. Abstractional machines are illustrated through an example that outlines their application to the task of natural language processing.