Revisiting Spurious Correlation in Domain Generalization

Without loss of generality, existing machine learning techniques may learn spurious correlation dependent on the domain, which exacerbates the generalization of models in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To address this issue, recent works build a structural causal model (SCM) to describe the causality within data generation process, thereby motivating methods to avoid the learning of spurious correlation by models. However, from the machine learning viewpoint, such a theoretical analysis omits the nuanced difference between the data generation process and representation learning process, resulting in that the causal analysis based on the former cannot well adapt to the latter. To this end, we explore to build a SCM for representation learning process and further conduct a thorough analysis of the mechanisms underlying spurious correlation. We underscore that adjusting erroneous covariates introduces bias, thus necessitating the correct selection of spurious correlation mechanisms based on practical application scenarios. In this regard, we substantiate the correctness of the proposed SCM and further propose to control confounding bias in OOD generalization by introducing a propensity score weighted estimator, which can be integrated into any existing OOD method as a plug-and-play module. The empirical results comprehensively demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on synthetic and large-scale real OOD datasets.

A Map-matching Algorithm with Extraction of Multi-group Information for Low-frequency Data

The growing use of probe vehicles generates a huge number of GNSS data. Limited by the satellite positioning technology, further improving the accuracy of map-matching is challenging work, especially for low-frequency trajectories. When matching a trajectory, the ego vehicle's spatial-temporal information of the present trip is the most useful with the least amount of data. In addition, there are a large amount of other data, e.g., other vehicles' state and past prediction results, but it is hard to extract useful information for matching maps and inferring paths. Most map-matching studies only used the ego vehicle's data and ignored other vehicles' data. Based on it, this paper designs a new map-matching method to make full use of "Big data". We first sort all data into four groups according to their spatial and temporal distance from the present matching probe which allows us to sort for their usefulness. Then we design three different methods to extract valuable information (scores) from them: a score for speed and bearing, a score for historical usage, and a score for traffic state using the spectral graph Markov neutral network. Finally, we use a modified top-K shortest-path method to search the candidate paths within an ellipse region and then use the fused score to infer the path (projected location). We test the proposed method against baseline algorithms using a real-world dataset in China. The results show that all scoring methods can enhance map-matching accuracy. Furthermore, our method outperforms the others, especially when GNSS probing frequency is less than 0.01 Hz.

Deep Snapshot HDR Reconstruction Based on the Polarization Camera

The recent development of the on-chip micro-polarizer technology has made it possible to acquire four spatially aligned and temporally synchronized polarization images with the same ease of operation as a conventional camera. In this paper, we investigate the use of this sensor technology in high-dynamic-range (HDR) imaging. Specifically, observing that natural light can be attenuated differently by varying the orientation of the polarization filter, we treat the multiple images captured by the polarization camera as a set captured under different exposure times. In our approach, we first study the relationship among polarizer orientation, degree and angle of polarization of light to the exposure time of a pixel in the polarization image. Subsequently, we propose a deep snapshot HDR reconstruction framework to recover an HDR image using the polarization images. A polarized HDR dataset is created to train and evaluate our approach. We demonstrate that our approach performs favorably against state-of-the-art HDR reconstruction algorithms.