An Outline of Prognostics and Health Management Large Model: Concepts, Paradigms, and Challenges

Prognosis and Health Management (PHM), critical for ensuring task completion by complex systems and preventing unexpected failures, is widely adopted in aerospace, manufacturing, maritime, rail, energy, etc. However, PHM's development is constrained by bottlenecks like generalization, interpretation and verification abilities. Presently, generative artificial intelligence (AI), represented by Large Model, heralds a technological revolution with the potential to fundamentally reshape traditional technological fields and human production methods. Its capabilities, including strong generalization, reasoning, and generative attributes, present opportunities to address PHM's bottlenecks. To this end, based on a systematic analysis of the current challenges and bottlenecks in PHM, as well as the research status and advantages of Large Model, we propose a novel concept and three progressive paradigms of Prognosis and Health Management Large Model (PHM-LM) through the integration of the Large Model with PHM. Subsequently, we provide feasible technical approaches for PHM-LM to bolster PHM's core capabilities within the framework of the three paradigms. Moreover, to address core issues confronting PHM, we discuss a series of technical challenges of PHM-LM throughout the entire process of construction and application. This comprehensive effort offers a holistic PHM-LM technical framework, and provides avenues for new PHM technologies, methodologies, tools, platforms and applications, which also potentially innovates design, research & development, verification and application mode of PHM. And furthermore, a new generation of PHM with AI will also capably be realized, i.e., from custom to generalized, from discriminative to generative, and from theoretical conditions to practical applications.

MIPI 2024 Challenge on Demosaic for HybridEVS Camera: Methods and Results

The increasing demand for computational photography and imaging on mobile platforms has led to the widespread development and integration of advanced image sensors with novel algorithms in camera systems. However, the scarcity of high-quality data for research and the rare opportunity for in-depth exchange of views from industry and academia constrain the development of mobile intelligent photography and imaging (MIPI). Building on the achievements of the previous MIPI Workshops held at ECCV 2022 and CVPR 2023, we introduce our third MIPI challenge including three tracks focusing on novel image sensors and imaging algorithms. In this paper, we summarize and review the Nighttime Flare Removal track on MIPI 2024. In total, 170 participants were successfully registered, and 14 teams submitted results in the final testing phase. The developed solutions in this challenge achieved state-of-the-art performance on Nighttime Flare Removal. More details of this challenge and the link to the dataset can be found at https://mipi-challenge.org/MIPI2024/.

GarchingSim: An Autonomous Driving Simulator with Photorealistic Scenes and Minimalist Workflow

Conducting real road testing for autonomous driving algorithms can be expensive and sometimes impractical, particularly for small startups and research institutes. Thus, simulation becomes an important method for evaluating these algorithms. However, the availability of free and open-source simulators is limited, and the installation and configuration process can be daunting for beginners and interdisciplinary researchers. We introduce an autonomous driving simulator with photorealistic scenes, meanwhile keeping a user-friendly workflow. The simulator is able to communicate with external algorithms through ROS2 or Socket.IO, making it compatible with existing software stacks. Furthermore, we implement a highly accurate vehicle dynamics model within the simulator to enhance the realism of the vehicle's physical effects. The simulator is able to serve various functions, including generating synthetic data and driving with machine learning-based algorithms. Moreover, we prioritize simplicity in the deployment process, ensuring that beginners find it approachable and user-friendly.

Versatile Medical Image Segmentation Learned from Multi-Source Datasets via Model Self-Disambiguation

A versatile medical image segmentation model applicable to imaging data collected with diverse equipment and protocols can facilitate model deployment and maintenance. However, building such a model typically requires a large, diverse, and fully annotated dataset, which is rarely available due to the labor-intensive and costly data curation. In this study, we develop a cost-efficient method by harnessing readily available data with partially or even sparsely annotated segmentation labels. We devise strategies for model self-disambiguation, prior knowledge incorporation, and imbalance mitigation to address challenges associated with inconsistently labeled data from various sources, including label ambiguity and imbalances across modalities, datasets, and segmentation labels. Experimental results on a multi-modal dataset compiled from eight different sources for abdominal organ segmentation have demonstrated our method's effectiveness and superior performance over alternative state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its potential for optimizing the use of existing annotated data and reducing the annotation efforts for new data to further enhance model capability.

MO-VLN: A Multi-Task Benchmark for Open-set Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation

Given a natural language, a general robot has to comprehend the instruction and find the target object or location based on visual observations even in unexplored environments. Most agents rely on massive diverse training data to achieve better generalization, which requires expensive labor. These agents often focus on common objects and fewer tasks, thus are not intelligent enough to handle different types of instructions. To facilitate research in open-set vision-and-language navigation, we propose a benchmark named MO-VLN, aiming at testing the effectiveness and generalization of the agent in the multi-task setting. First, we develop a 3D simulator rendered by realistic scenarios using Unreal Engine 5, containing more realistic lights and details. The simulator contains three scenes, i.e., cafe, restaurant, and nursing house, of high value in the industry. Besides, our simulator involves multiple uncommon objects, such as takeaway cup and medical adhesive tape, which are more complicated compared with existing environments. Inspired by the recent success of large language models (e.g., ChatGPT, Vicuna), we construct diverse high-quality data of instruction type without human annotation. Our benchmark MO-VLN provides four tasks: 1) goal-conditioned navigation given a specific object category (e.g., "fork"); 2) goal-conditioned navigation given simple instructions (e.g., "Search for and move towards a tennis ball"); 3) step-by-step instruction following; 4) finding abstract object based on high-level instruction (e.g., "I am thirsty").

Multistatic Integrated Sensing and Communication System in Cellular Networks

A novel multistatic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system in cellular networks is proposed. It can make use of widespread base stations (BSs) to perform cooperative sensing in wide area. This system is important since the deployment of sensing function can be achieved based on the existing mobile communication networks at a low cost. In this system, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals transmitted from the central BS are received and processed by each of the neighboring BSs to estimate sensing object parameters. A joint data processing method is then introduced to derive the closed-form solution of objects position and velocity. Numerical simulation shows that the proposed multistatic system can improve the position and velocity estimation accuracy compared with monostatic and bistatic system, demonstrating the effectiveness and promise of implementing ISAC in the upcoming fifth generation advanced (5G-A) and sixth generation (6G) mobile networks.

BUMP: A Benchmark of Unfaithful Minimal Pairs for Meta-Evaluation of Faithfulness Metrics

The proliferation of automatic faithfulness metrics for summarization has produced a need for benchmarks to evaluate them. While existing benchmarks measure the correlation with human judgements of faithfulness on model-generated summaries, they are insufficient for diagnosing whether metrics are: 1) consistent, i.e., decrease as errors are introduced into a summary, 2) effective on human-written texts, and 3) sensitive to different error types (as summaries can contain multiple errors). To address these needs, we present a benchmark of unfaithful minimal pairs (BUMP), a dataset of 889 human-written, minimally different summary pairs, where a single error (from an ontology of 7 types) is introduced to a summary from the CNN/DailyMail dataset to produce an unfaithful summary. We find BUMP complements existing benchmarks in a number of ways: 1) the summaries in BUMP are harder to discriminate and less probable under SOTA summarization models, 2) BUMP enables measuring the consistency of metrics, and reveals that the most discriminative metrics tend not to be the most consistent, 3) BUMP enables the measurement of metrics' performance on individual error types and highlights areas of weakness for future work.

5G PRS-Based Sensing: A Sensing Reference Signal Approach for Joint Sensing and Communication System

The emerging joint sensing and communication (JSC) technology is expected to support new applications and services, such as autonomous driving and extended reality (XR), in the future wireless communication systems. Pilot (or reference) signals in wireless communications usually have good passive detection performance, strong anti-noise capability and good auto-correlation characteristics, hence they bear the potential for applying in radar sensing. In this paper, we investigate how to apply the positioning reference signal (PRS) of the 5th generation (5G) mobile communications in radar sensing. This approach has the unique benefit of compatibility with the most advanced mobile communication system available so far. Thus, the PRS can be regarded as a sensing reference signal to simultaneously realize the functions of radar sensing, communication and positioning in a convenient manner. Firstly, we propose a PRS based radar sensing scheme and analyze its range and velocity estimation performance, based on which we propose a method that improves the accuracy of velocity estimation by using multiple frames. Furthermore, the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of the range and velocity estimation for PRS based radar sensing and the CRLB of the range estimation for PRS based positioning are derived. Our analysis and simulation results demonstrate the feasibility and superiority of PRS over other pilot signals in radar sensing. Finally, some suggestions for the future 5G-Advanced and 6th generation (6G) frame structure design containing the sensing reference signal are derived based on our study.

2nd Place Solution for ICCV 2021 VIPriors Image Classification Challenge: An Attract-and-Repulse Learning Approach

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved significant success in image classification by utilizing large-scale datasets. However, it is still of great challenge to learn from scratch on small-scale datasets efficiently and effectively. With limited training datasets, the concepts of categories will be ambiguous since the over-parameterized CNNs tend to simply memorize the dataset, leading to poor generalization capacity. Therefore, it is crucial to study how to learn more discriminative representations while avoiding over-fitting. Since the concepts of categories tend to be ambiguous, it is important to catch more individual-wise information. Thus, we propose a new framework, termed Attract-and-Repulse, which consists of Contrastive Regularization (CR) to enrich the feature representations, Symmetric Cross Entropy (SCE) to balance the fitting for different classes and Mean Teacher to calibrate label information. Specifically, SCE and CR learn discriminative representations while alleviating over-fitting by the adaptive trade-off between the information of classes (attract) and instances (repulse). After that, Mean Teacher is used to further improve the performance via calibrating more accurate soft pseudo labels. Sufficient experiments validate the effectiveness of the Attract-and-Repulse framework. Together with other strategies, such as aggressive data augmentation, TenCrop inference, and models ensembling, we achieve the second place in ICCV 2021 VIPriors Image Classification Challenge.

Self-distilled Knowledge Delegator for Exemplar-free Class Incremental Learning

Exemplar-free incremental learning is extremely challenging due to inaccessibility of data from old tasks. In this paper, we attempt to exploit the knowledge encoded in a previously trained classification model to handle the catastrophic forgetting problem in continual learning. Specifically, we introduce a so-called knowledge delegator, which is capable of transferring knowledge from the trained model to a randomly re-initialized new model by generating informative samples. Given the previous model only, the delegator is effectively learned using a self-distillation mechanism in a data-free manner. The knowledge extracted by the delegator is then utilized to maintain the performance of the model on old tasks in incremental learning. This simple incremental learning framework surpasses existing exemplar-free methods by a large margin on four widely used class incremental benchmarks, namely CIFAR-100, ImageNet-Subset, Caltech-101 and Flowers-102. Notably, we achieve comparable performance to some exemplar-based methods without accessing any exemplars.