Customized Multiple Clustering via Multi-Modal Subspace Proxy Learning

Multiple clustering aims to discover various latent structures of data from different aspects. Deep multiple clustering methods have achieved remarkable performance by exploiting complex patterns and relationships in data. However, existing works struggle to flexibly adapt to diverse user-specific needs in data grouping, which may require manual understanding of each clustering. To address these limitations, we introduce Multi-Sub, a novel end-to-end multiple clustering approach that incorporates a multi-modal subspace proxy learning framework in this work. Utilizing the synergistic capabilities of CLIP and GPT-4, Multi-Sub aligns textual prompts expressing user preferences with their corresponding visual representations. This is achieved by automatically generating proxy words from large language models that act as subspace bases, thus allowing for the customized representation of data in terms specific to the user's interests. Our method consistently outperforms existing baselines across a broad set of datasets in visual multiple clustering tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Alexander-Yao/Multi-Sub.

Swift Sampler: Efficient Learning of Sampler by 10 Parameters

Data selection is essential for training deep learning models. An effective data sampler assigns proper sampling probability for training data and helps the model converge to a good local minimum with high performance. Previous studies in data sampling are mainly based on heuristic rules or learning through a huge amount of time-consuming trials. In this paper, we propose an automatic \textbf{swift sampler} search algorithm, \textbf{SS}, to explore automatically learning effective samplers efficiently. In particular, \textbf{SS} utilizes a novel formulation to map a sampler to a low dimension of hyper-parameters and uses an approximated local minimum to quickly examine the quality of a sampler. Benefiting from its low computational expense, \textbf{SS} can be applied on large-scale data sets with high efficiency. Comprehensive experiments on various tasks demonstrate that \textbf{SS} powered sampling can achieve obvious improvements (e.g., 1.5\% on ImageNet) and transfer among different neural networks. Project page: https://github.com/Alexander-Yao/Swift-Sampler.

Text-Guided Mixup Towards Long-Tailed Image Categorization

In many real-world applications, the frequency distribution of class labels for training data can exhibit a long-tailed distribution, which challenges traditional approaches of training deep neural networks that require heavy amounts of balanced data. Gathering and labeling data to balance out the class label distribution can be both costly and time-consuming. Many existing solutions that enable ensemble learning, re-balancing strategies, or fine-tuning applied to deep neural networks are limited by the inert problem of few class samples across a subset of classes. Recently, vision-language models like CLIP have been observed as effective solutions to zero-shot or few-shot learning by grasping a similarity between vision and language features for image and text pairs. Considering that large pre-trained vision-language models may contain valuable side textual information for minor classes, we propose to leverage text supervision to tackle the challenge of long-tailed learning. Concretely, we propose a novel text-guided mixup technique that takes advantage of the semantic relations between classes recognized by the pre-trained text encoder to help alleviate the long-tailed problem. Our empirical study on benchmark long-tailed tasks demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposal with a theoretical guarantee. Our code is available at https://github.com/rsamf/text-guided-mixup.

Blind Beamforming for Coverage Enhancement with Intelligent Reflecting Surface

Conventional policy for configuring an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) typically requires channel state information (CSI), thus incurring substantial overhead costs and facing incompatibility with the current network protocols. This paper proposes a blind beamforming strategy in the absence of CSI, aiming to boost the minimum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) among all the receiver positions, namely the coverage enhancement. Although some existing works already consider the IRS-assisted coverage enhancement without CSI, they assume certain position-channel models through which the channels can be recovered from the geographic locations. In contrast, our approach solely relies on the received signal power data, not assuming any position-channel model. We examine the achievability and converse of the proposed blind beamforming method. If the IRS has $N$ reflective elements and there are $U$ receiver positions, then our method guarantees the minimum SNR of $\Omega(N^2/U)$ -- which is fairly close to the upper bound $O(N+N^2\sqrt{\ln (NU)}/\sqrt[4]{U})$. Aside from the simulation results, we justify the practical use of blind beamforming in a field test at 2.6 GHz. According to the real-world experiment, the proposed blind beamforming method boosts the minimum SNR across seven random positions in a conference room by 18.22 dB, while the position-based method yields a boost of 12.08 dB.

Multi-Modal Proxy Learning Towards Personalized Visual Multiple Clustering

Multiple clustering has gained significant attention in recent years due to its potential to reveal multiple hidden structures of data from different perspectives. The advent of deep multiple clustering techniques has notably advanced the performance by uncovering complex patterns and relationships within large datasets. However, a major challenge arises as users often do not need all the clusterings that algorithms generate, and figuring out the one needed requires a substantial understanding of each clustering result. Traditionally, aligning a user's brief keyword of interest with the corresponding vision components was challenging, but the emergence of multi-modal and large language models (LLMs) has begun to bridge this gap. In response, given unlabeled target visual data, we propose Multi-MaP, a novel method employing a multi-modal proxy learning process. It leverages CLIP encoders to extract coherent text and image embeddings, with GPT-4 integrating users' interests to formulate effective textual contexts. Moreover, reference word constraint and concept-level constraint are designed to learn the optimal text proxy according to the user's interest. Multi-MaP not only adeptly captures a user's interest via a keyword but also facilitates identifying relevant clusterings. Our extensive experiments show that Multi-MaP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in all benchmark multi-clustering vision tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Alexander-Yao/Multi-MaP.

Dual-disentangled Deep Multiple Clustering

Multiple clustering has gathered significant attention in recent years due to its potential to reveal multiple hidden structures of the data from different perspectives. Most of multiple clustering methods first derive feature representations by controlling the dissimilarity among them, subsequently employing traditional clustering methods (e.g., k-means) to achieve the final multiple clustering outcomes. However, the learned feature representations can exhibit a weak relevance to the ultimate goal of distinct clustering. Moreover, these features are often not explicitly learned for the purpose of clustering. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel Dual-Disentangled deep Multiple Clustering method named DDMC by learning disentangled representations. Specifically, DDMC is achieved by a variational Expectation-Maximization (EM) framework. In the E-step, the disentanglement learning module employs coarse-grained and fine-grained disentangled representations to obtain a more diverse set of latent factors from the data. In the M-step, the cluster assignment module utilizes a cluster objective function to augment the effectiveness of the cluster output. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that DDMC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across seven commonly used tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Alexander-Yao/DDMC.

Building Lane-Level Maps from Aerial Images

Detecting lane lines from sensors is becoming an increasingly significant part of autonomous driving systems. However, less development has been made on high-definition lane-level mapping based on aerial images, which could automatically build and update offline maps for auto-driving systems. To this end, our work focuses on extracting fine-level detailed lane lines together with their topological structures. This task is challenging since it requires large amounts of data covering different lane types, terrain and regions. In this paper, we introduce for the first time a large-scale aerial image dataset built for lane detection, with high-quality polyline lane annotations on high-resolution images of around 80 kilometers of road. Moreover, we developed a baseline deep learning lane detection method from aerial images, called AerialLaneNet, consisting of two stages. The first stage is to produce coarse-grained results at point level, and the second stage exploits the coarse-grained results and feature to perform the vertex-matching task, producing fine-grained lanes with topology. The experiments show our approach achieves significant improvement compared with the state-of-the-art methods on our new dataset. Our code and new dataset are available at https://github.com/Jiawei-Yao0812/AerialLaneNet.

DepthSSC: Depth-Spatial Alignment and Dynamic Voxel Resolution for Monocular 3D Semantic Scene Completion

The task of 3D semantic scene completion with monocular cameras is gaining increasing attention in the field of autonomous driving. Its objective is to predict the occupancy status of each voxel in the 3D scene from partial image inputs. Despite the existence of numerous methods, many of them overlook the issue of accurate alignment between spatial and depth information. To address this, we propose DepthSSC, an advanced method for semantic scene completion solely based on monocular cameras. DepthSSC combines the ST-GF (Spatial Transformation Graph Fusion) module with geometric-aware voxelization, enabling dynamic adjustment of voxel resolution and considering the geometric complexity of 3D space to ensure precise alignment between spatial and depth information. This approach successfully mitigates spatial misalignment and distortion issues observed in prior methods. Through evaluation on the SemanticKITTI dataset, DepthSSC not only demonstrates its effectiveness in capturing intricate 3D structural details but also achieves state-of-the-art performance. We believe DepthSSC provides a fresh perspective on monocular camera-based 3D semantic scene completion research and anticipate it will inspire further related studies.

Geometry-Guided Ray Augmentation for Neural Surface Reconstruction with Sparse Views

In this paper, we propose a novel method for 3D scene and object reconstruction from sparse multi-view images. Different from previous methods that leverage extra information such as depth or generalizable features across scenes, our approach leverages the scene properties embedded in the multi-view inputs to create precise pseudo-labels for optimization without any prior training. Specifically, we introduce a geometry-guided approach that improves surface reconstruction accuracy from sparse views by leveraging spherical harmonics to predict the novel radiance while holistically considering all color observations for a point in the scene. Also, our pipeline exploits proxy geometry and correctly handles the occlusion in generating the pseudo-labels of radiance, which previous image-warping methods fail to avoid. Our method, dubbed Ray Augmentation (RayAug), achieves superior results on DTU and Blender datasets without requiring prior training, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing the problem of sparse view reconstruction. Our pipeline is flexible and can be integrated into other implicit neural reconstruction methods for sparse views.

DynamicBEV: Leveraging Dynamic Queries and Temporal Context for 3D Object Detection

3D object detection is crucial for applications like autonomous driving and robotics. While query-based 3D object detection for BEV (Bird's Eye View) images has seen significant advancements, most existing methods follows the paradigm of static query. Such paradigm is incapable of adapting to complex spatial-temporal relationships in the scene. To solve this problem, we introduce a new paradigm in DynamicBEV, a novel approach that employs dynamic queries for BEV-based 3D object detection. In contrast to static queries, the proposed dynamic queries exploit K-means clustering and Top-K Attention in a creative way to aggregate information more effectively from both local and distant feature, which enable DynamicBEV to adapt iteratively to complex scenes. To further boost efficiency, DynamicBEV incorporates a Lightweight Temporal Fusion Module (LTFM), designed for efficient temporal context integration with a significant computation reduction. Additionally, a custom-designed Diversity Loss ensures a balanced feature representation across scenarios. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset validate the effectiveness of DynamicBEV, establishing a new state-of-the-art and heralding a paradigm-level breakthrough in query-based BEV object detection.