GrassNet: State Space Model Meets Graph Neural Network

Designing spectral convolutional networks is a formidable task in graph learning. In traditional spectral graph neural networks (GNNs), polynomial-based methods are commonly used to design filters via the Laplacian matrix. In practical applications, however, these polynomial methods encounter inherent limitations, which primarily arise from the the low-order truncation of polynomial filters and the lack of overall modeling of the graph spectrum. This leads to poor performance of existing spectral approaches on real-world graph data, especially when the spectrum is highly concentrated or contains many numerically identical values, as they tend to apply the exact same modulation to signals with the same frequencies. To overcome these issues, in this paper, we propose Graph State Space Network (GrassNet), a novel graph neural network with theoretical support that provides a simple yet effective scheme for designing and learning arbitrary graph spectral filters. In particular, our GrassNet introduces structured state space models (SSMs) to model the correlations of graph signals at different frequencies and derives a unique rectification for each frequency in the graph spectrum. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to employ SSMs for the design of GNN spectral filters, and it theoretically offers greater expressive power compared with polynomial filters. Extensive experiments on nine public benchmarks reveal that GrassNet achieves superior performance in real-world graph modeling tasks.

DFA-GNN: Forward Learning of Graph Neural Networks by Direct Feedback Alignment

Graph neural networks are recognized for their strong performance across various applications, with the backpropagation algorithm playing a central role in the development of most GNN models. However, despite its effectiveness, BP has limitations that challenge its biological plausibility and affect the efficiency, scalability and parallelism of training neural networks for graph-based tasks. While several non-BP training algorithms, such as the direct feedback alignment, have been successfully applied to fully-connected and convolutional network components for handling Euclidean data, directly adapting these non-BP frameworks to manage non-Euclidean graph data in GNN models presents significant challenges. These challenges primarily arise from the violation of the i.i.d. assumption in graph data and the difficulty in accessing prediction errors for all samples (nodes) within the graph. To overcome these obstacles, in this paper we propose DFA-GNN, a novel forward learning framework tailored for GNNs with a case study of semi-supervised learning. The proposed method breaks the limitations of BP by using a dedicated forward training mechanism. Specifically, DFA-GNN extends the principles of DFA to adapt to graph data and unique architecture of GNNs, which incorporates the information of graph topology into the feedback links to accommodate the non-Euclidean characteristics of graph data. Additionally, for semi-supervised graph learning tasks, we developed a pseudo error generator that spreads residual errors from training data to create a pseudo error for each unlabeled node. These pseudo errors are then utilized to train GNNs using DFA. Extensive experiments on 10 public benchmarks reveal that our learning framework outperforms not only previous non-BP methods but also the standard BP methods, and it exhibits excellent robustness against various types of noise and attacks.

The Cascaded Forward Algorithm for Neural Network Training

Backpropagation algorithm has been widely used as a mainstream learning procedure for neural networks in the past decade, and has played a significant role in the development of deep learning. However, there exist some limitations associated with this algorithm, such as getting stuck in local minima and experiencing vanishing/exploding gradients, which have led to questions about its biological plausibility. To address these limitations, alternative algorithms to backpropagation have been preliminarily explored, with the Forward-Forward (FF) algorithm being one of the most well-known. In this paper we propose a new learning framework for neural networks, namely Cascaded Forward (CaFo) algorithm, which does not rely on BP optimization as that in FF. Unlike FF, our framework directly outputs label distributions at each cascaded block, which does not require generation of additional negative samples and thus leads to a more efficient process at both training and testing. Moreover, in our framework each block can be trained independently, so it can be easily deployed into parallel acceleration systems. The proposed method is evaluated on four public image classification benchmarks, and the experimental results illustrate significant improvement in prediction accuracy in comparison with the baseline.

Collaborative Perception in Autonomous Driving: Methods, Datasets and Challenges

Collaborative perception is essential to address occlusion and sensor failure issues in autonomous driving. In recent years, deep learning on collaborative perception has become even thriving, with numerous methods have been proposed. Although some works have reviewed and analyzed the basic architecture and key components in this field, there is still a lack of reviews on systematical collaboration modules in perception networks and large-scale collaborative perception datasets. The primary goal of this work is to address the abovementioned issues and provide a comprehensive review of recent achievements in this field. First, we introduce fundamental technologies and collaboration schemes. Following that, we provide an overview of practical collaborative perception methods and systematically summarize the collaboration modules in networks to improve collaboration efficiency and performance while also ensuring collaboration robustness and safety. Then, we present large-scale public datasets and summarize quantitative results on these benchmarks. Finally, we discuss the remaining challenges and promising future research directions.

Deep Probabilistic Graph Matching

Most previous learning-based graph matching algorithms solve the \textit{quadratic assignment problem} (QAP) by dropping one or more of the matching constraints and adopting a relaxed assignment solver to obtain sub-optimal correspondences. Such relaxation may actually weaken the original graph matching problem, and in turn hurt the matching performance. In this paper we propose a deep learning-based graph matching framework that works for the original QAP without compromising on the matching constraints. In particular, we design an affinity-assignment prediction network to jointly learn the pairwise affinity and estimate the node assignments, and we then develop a differentiable solver inspired by the probabilistic perspective of the pairwise affinities. Aiming to obtain better matching results, the probabilistic solver refines the estimated assignments in an iterative manner to impose both discrete and one-to-one matching constraints. The proposed method is evaluated on three popularly tested benchmarks (Pascal VOC, Willow Object and SPair-71k), and it outperforms all previous state-of-the-arts on all benchmarks.

GLAN: A Graph-based Linear Assignment Network

Differentiable solvers for the linear assignment problem (LAP) have attracted much research attention in recent years, which are usually embedded into learning frameworks as components. However, previous algorithms, with or without learning strategies, usually suffer from the degradation of the optimality with the increment of the problem size. In this paper, we propose a learnable linear assignment solver based on deep graph networks. Specifically, we first transform the cost matrix to a bipartite graph and convert the assignment task to the problem of selecting reliable edges from the constructed graph. Subsequently, a deep graph network is developed to aggregate and update the features of nodes and edges. Finally, the network predicts a label for each edge that indicates the assignment relationship. The experimental results on a synthetic dataset reveal that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and achieves consistently high accuracy with the increment of the problem size. Furthermore, we also embed the proposed solver, in comparison with state-of-the-art baseline solvers, into a popular multi-object tracking (MOT) framework to train the tracker in an end-to-end manner. The experimental results on MOT benchmarks illustrate that the proposed LAP solver improves the tracker by the largest margin.

Clicking Matters:Towards Interactive Human Parsing

In this work, we focus on Interactive Human Parsing (IHP), which aims to segment a human image into multiple human body parts with guidance from users' interactions. This new task inherits the class-aware property of human parsing, which cannot be well solved by traditional interactive image segmentation approaches that are generally class-agnostic. To tackle this new task, we first exploit user clicks to identify different human parts in the given image. These clicks are subsequently transformed into semantic-aware localization maps, which are concatenated with the RGB image to form the input of the segmentation network and generate the initial parsing result. To enable the network to better perceive user's purpose during the correction process, we investigate several principal ways for the refinement, and reveal that random-sampling-based click augmentation is the best way for promoting the correction effectiveness. Furthermore, we also propose a semantic-perceiving loss (SP-loss) to augment the training, which can effectively exploit the semantic relationships of clicks for better optimization. To the best knowledge, this work is the first attempt to tackle the human parsing task under the interactive setting. Our IHP solution achieves 85\% mIoU on the benchmark LIP, 80\% mIoU on PASCAL-Person-Part and CIHP, 75\% mIoU on Helen with only 1.95, 3.02, 2.84 and 1.09 clicks per class respectively. These results demonstrate that we can simply acquire high-quality human parsing masks with only a few human effort. We hope this work can motivate more researchers to develop data-efficient solutions to IHP in the future.

MSO: Multi-Feature Space Joint Optimization Network for RGB-Infrared Person Re-Identification

The RGB-infrared cross-modality person re-identification (ReID) task aims to recognize the images of the same identity between the visible modality and the infrared modality. Existing methods mainly use a two-stream architecture to eliminate the discrepancy between the two modalities in the final common feature space, which ignore the single space of each modality in the shallow layers. To solve it, in this paper, we present a novel multi-feature space joint optimization (MSO) network, which can learn modality-sharable features in both the single-modality space and the common space. Firstly, based on the observation that edge information is modality-invariant, we propose an edge features enhancement module to enhance the modality-sharable features in each single-modality space. Specifically, we design a perceptual edge features (PEF) loss after the edge fusion strategy analysis. According to our knowledge, this is the first work that proposes explicit optimization in the single-modality feature space on cross-modality ReID task. Moreover, to increase the difference between cross-modality distance and class distance, we introduce a novel cross-modality contrastive-center (CMCC) loss into the modality-joint constraints in the common feature space. The PEF loss and CMCC loss jointly optimize the model in an end-to-end manner, which markedly improves the network's performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both the SYSU-MM01 and RegDB datasets.

Joint Graph Learning and Matching for Semantic Feature Correspondence

In recent years, powered by the learned discriminative representation via graph neural network (GNN) models, deep graph matching methods have made great progresses in the task of matching semantic features. However, these methods usually rely on heuristically generated graph patterns, which may introduce unreliable relationships to hurt the matching performance. In this paper, we propose a joint \emph{graph learning and matching} network, named GLAM, to explore reliable graph structures for boosting graph matching. GLAM adopts a pure attention-based framework for both graph learning and graph matching. Specifically, it employs two types of attention mechanisms, self-attention and cross-attention for the task. The self-attention discovers the relationships between features and to further update feature representations over the learnt structures; and the cross-attention computes cross-graph correlations between the two feature sets to be matched for feature reconstruction. Moreover, the final matching solution is directly derived from the output of the cross-attention layer, without employing a specific matching decision module. The proposed method is evaluated on three popular visual matching benchmarks (Pascal VOC, Willow Object and SPair-71k), and it outperforms previous state-of-the-art graph matching methods by significant margins on all benchmarks. Furthermore, the graph patterns learnt by our model are validated to be able to remarkably enhance previous deep graph matching methods by replacing their handcrafted graph structures with the learnt ones.

A Universal Model for Cross Modality Mapping by Relational Reasoning

With the aim of matching a pair of instances from two different modalities, cross modality mapping has attracted growing attention in the computer vision community. Existing methods usually formulate the mapping function as the similarity measure between the pair of instance features, which are embedded to a common space. However, we observe that the relationships among the instances within a single modality (intra relations) and those between the pair of heterogeneous instances (inter relations) are insufficiently explored in previous approaches. Motivated by this, we redefine the mapping function with relational reasoning via graph modeling, and further propose a GCN-based Relational Reasoning Network (RR-Net) in which inter and intra relations are efficiently computed to universally resolve the cross modality mapping problem. Concretely, we first construct two kinds of graph, i.e., Intra Graph and Inter Graph, to respectively model intra relations and inter relations. Then RR-Net updates all the node features and edge features in an iterative manner for learning intra and inter relations simultaneously. Last, RR-Net outputs the probabilities over the edges which link a pair of heterogeneous instances to estimate the mapping results. Extensive experiments on three example tasks, i.e., image classification, social recommendation and sound recognition, clearly demonstrate the superiority and universality of our proposed model.