UniLCD: Unified Local-Cloud Decision-Making via Reinforcement Learning

Embodied vision-based real-world systems, such as mobile robots, require a careful balance between energy consumption, compute latency, and safety constraints to optimize operation across dynamic tasks and contexts. As local computation tends to be restricted, offloading the computation, ie, to a remote server, can save local resources while providing access to high-quality predictions from powerful and large models. However, the resulting communication and latency overhead has led to limited usability of cloud models in dynamic, safety-critical, real-time settings. To effectively address this trade-off, we introduce UniLCD, a novel hybrid inference framework for enabling flexible local-cloud collaboration. By efficiently optimizing a flexible routing module via reinforcement learning and a suitable multi-task objective, UniLCD is specifically designed to support the multiple constraints of safety-critical end-to-end mobile systems. We validate the proposed approach using a challenging, crowded navigation task requiring frequent and timely switching between local and cloud operations. UniLCD demonstrates improved overall performance and efficiency, by over 35% compared to state-of-the-art baselines based on various split computing and early exit strategies.

Person Re-identification by analyzing Dynamic Variations in Gait Sequences

Gait recognition is a biometric technology that identifies individuals in a video sequence by analysing their style of walking or limb movement. However, this identification is generally sensitive to appearance changes and conventional feature descriptors such as Gait Energy Image (GEI) lose some of the dynamic information in the gait sequence. Active Energy Image (AEI) focuses more on dynamic motion changes than GEI and is more suited to deal with appearance changes. We propose a new approach, which allows recognizing people by analysing the dynamic motion variations and identifying people without using a database of predicted changes. In the proposed method, the active energy image is calculated by averaging the difference frames of the silhouette sequence and divided into multiple segments. Affine moment invariants are computed as gait features for each section. Next, matching weights are calculated based on the similarity between extracted features and those in the database. Finally, the subject is identified by the weighted combination of similarities in all segments. The CASIA-B Gait Database is used as the principal dataset for the experimental analysis.