Negative-Free Self-Supervised Gaussian Embedding of Graphs

Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has recently emerged as a promising graph self-supervised learning framework for learning discriminative node representations without labels. The widely adopted objective function of GCL benefits from two key properties: \emph{alignment} and \emph{uniformity}, which align representations of positive node pairs while uniformly distributing all representations on the hypersphere. The uniformity property plays a critical role in preventing representation collapse and is achieved by pushing apart augmented views of different nodes (negative pairs). As such, existing GCL methods inherently rely on increasing the quantity and quality of negative samples, resulting in heavy computational demands, memory overhead, and potential class collision issues. In this study, we propose a negative-free objective to achieve uniformity, inspired by the fact that points distributed according to a normalized isotropic Gaussian are uniformly spread across the unit hypersphere. Therefore, we can minimize the distance between the distribution of learned representations and the isotropic Gaussian distribution to promote the uniformity of node representations. Our method also distinguishes itself from other approaches by eliminating the need for a parameterized mutual information estimator, an additional projector, asymmetric structures, and, crucially, negative samples. Extensive experiments over seven graph benchmarks demonstrate that our proposal achieves competitive performance with fewer parameters, shorter training times, and lower memory consumption compared to existing GCL methods.

Enhancing Vectorized Map Perception with Historical Rasterized Maps

In autonomous driving, there is growing interest in end-to-end online vectorized map perception in bird's-eye-view (BEV) space, with an expectation that it could replace traditional high-cost offline high-definition (HD) maps. However, the accuracy and robustness of these methods can be easily compromised in challenging conditions, such as occlusion or adverse weather, when relying only on onboard sensors. In this paper, we propose HRMapNet, leveraging a low-cost Historical Rasterized Map to enhance online vectorized map perception. The historical rasterized map can be easily constructed from past predicted vectorized results and provides valuable complementary information. To fully exploit a historical map, we propose two novel modules to enhance BEV features and map element queries. For BEV features, we employ a feature aggregation module to encode features from both onboard images and the historical map. For map element queries, we design a query initialization module to endow queries with priors from the historical map. The two modules contribute to leveraging map information in online perception. Our HRMapNet can be integrated with most online vectorized map perception methods. We integrate it in two state-of-the-art methods, significantly improving their performance on both the nuScenes and Argoverse 2 datasets. The source code is released at https://github.com/HXMap/HRMapNet.

Enhanced Scale-aware Depth Estimation for Monocular Endoscopic Scenes with Geometric Modeling

Scale-aware monocular depth estimation poses a significant challenge in computer-aided endoscopic navigation. However, existing depth estimation methods that do not consider the geometric priors struggle to learn the absolute scale from training with monocular endoscopic sequences. Additionally, conventional methods face difficulties in accurately estimating details on tissue and instruments boundaries. In this paper, we tackle these problems by proposing a novel enhanced scale-aware framework that only uses monocular images with geometric modeling for depth estimation. Specifically, we first propose a multi-resolution depth fusion strategy to enhance the quality of monocular depth estimation. To recover the precise scale between relative depth and real-world values, we further calculate the 3D poses of instruments in the endoscopic scenes by algebraic geometry based on the image-only geometric primitives (i.e., boundaries and tip of instruments). Afterwards, the 3D poses of surgical instruments enable the scale recovery of relative depth maps. By coupling scale factors and relative depth estimation, the scale-aware depth of the monocular endoscopic scenes can be estimated. We evaluate the pipeline on in-house endoscopic surgery videos and simulated data. The results demonstrate that our method can learn the absolute scale with geometric modeling and accurately estimate scale-aware depth for monocular scenes.

Scalable and Adaptive Spectral Embedding for Attributed Graph Clustering

Attributed graph clustering, which aims to group the nodes of an attributed graph into disjoint clusters, has made promising advancements in recent years. However, most existing methods face challenges when applied to large graphs due to the expensive computational cost and high memory usage. In this paper, we introduce Scalable and Adaptive Spectral Embedding (SASE), a simple attributed graph clustering method devoid of parameter learning. SASE comprises three main components: node features smoothing via $k$-order simple graph convolution, scalable spectral clustering using random Fourier features, and adaptive order selection. With these designs, SASE not only effectively captures global cluster structures but also exhibits linear time and space complexity relative to the graph size. Empirical results demonstrate the superiority of SASE. For example, on the ArXiv dataset with 169K nodes and 1.17M edges, SASE achieves a 6.9\% improvement in ACC and a $5.87\times$ speedup compared to the runner-up, S3GC.

Bootstrap Latents of Nodes and Neighbors for Graph Self-Supervised Learning

Contrastive learning is a significant paradigm in graph self-supervised learning. However, it requires negative samples to prevent model collapse and learn discriminative representations. These negative samples inevitably lead to heavy computation, memory overhead and class collision, compromising the representation learning. Recent studies present that methods obviating negative samples can attain competitive performance and scalability enhancements, exemplified by bootstrapped graph latents (BGRL). However, BGRL neglects the inherent graph homophily, which provides valuable insights into underlying positive pairs. Our motivation arises from the observation that subtly introducing a few ground-truth positive pairs significantly improves BGRL. Although we can't obtain ground-truth positive pairs without labels under the self-supervised setting, edges in the graph can reflect noisy positive pairs, i.e., neighboring nodes often share the same label. Therefore, we propose to expand the positive pair set with node-neighbor pairs. Subsequently, we introduce a cross-attention module to predict the supportiveness score of a neighbor with respect to the anchor node. This score quantifies the positive support from each neighboring node, and is encoded into the training objective. Consequently, our method mitigates class collision from negative and noisy positive samples, concurrently enhancing intra-class compactness. Extensive experiments are conducted on five benchmark datasets and three downstream task node classification, node clustering, and node similarity search. The results demonstrate that our method generates node representations with enhanced intra-class compactness and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Reliable Node Similarity Matrix Guided Contrastive Graph Clustering

Graph clustering, which involves the partitioning of nodes within a graph into disjoint clusters, holds significant importance for numerous subsequent applications. Recently, contrastive learning, known for utilizing supervisory information, has demonstrated encouraging results in deep graph clustering. This methodology facilitates the learning of favorable node representations for clustering by attracting positively correlated node pairs and distancing negatively correlated pairs within the representation space. Nevertheless, a significant limitation of existing methods is their inadequacy in thoroughly exploring node-wise similarity. For instance, some hypothesize that the node similarity matrix within the representation space is identical, ignoring the inherent semantic relationships among nodes. Given the fundamental role of instance similarity in clustering, our research investigates contrastive graph clustering from the perspective of the node similarity matrix. We argue that an ideal node similarity matrix within the representation space should accurately reflect the inherent semantic relationships among nodes, ensuring the preservation of semantic similarities in the learned representations. In response to this, we introduce a new framework, Reliable Node Similarity Matrix Guided Contrastive Graph Clustering (NS4GC), which estimates an approximately ideal node similarity matrix within the representation space to guide representation learning. Our method introduces node-neighbor alignment and semantic-aware sparsification, ensuring the node similarity matrix is both accurate and efficiently sparse. Comprehensive experiments conducted on $8$ real-world datasets affirm the efficacy of learning the node similarity matrix and the superior performance of NS4GC.

$E^{3}$Gen: Efficient, Expressive and Editable Avatars Generation

This paper aims to introduce 3D Gaussian for efficient, expressive, and editable digital avatar generation. This task faces two major challenges: (1) The unstructured nature of 3D Gaussian makes it incompatible with current generation pipelines; (2) the expressive animation of 3D Gaussian in a generative setting that involves training with multiple subjects remains unexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel avatar generation method named $E^3$Gen, to effectively address these challenges. First, we propose a novel generative UV features plane representation that encodes unstructured 3D Gaussian onto a structured 2D UV space defined by the SMPL-X parametric model. This novel representation not only preserves the representation ability of the original 3D Gaussian but also introduces a shared structure among subjects to enable generative learning of the diffusion model. To tackle the second challenge, we propose a part-aware deformation module to achieve robust and accurate full-body expressive pose control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in avatar generation and enables expressive full-body pose control and editing.

IPAD: Industrial Process Anomaly Detection Dataset

Video anomaly detection (VAD) is a challenging task aiming to recognize anomalies in video frames, and existing large-scale VAD researches primarily focus on road traffic and human activity scenes. In industrial scenes, there are often a variety of unpredictable anomalies, and the VAD method can play a significant role in these scenarios. However, there is a lack of applicable datasets and methods specifically tailored for industrial production scenarios due to concerns regarding privacy and security. To bridge this gap, we propose a new dataset, IPAD, specifically designed for VAD in industrial scenarios. The industrial processes in our dataset are chosen through on-site factory research and discussions with engineers. This dataset covers 16 different industrial devices and contains over 6 hours of both synthetic and real-world video footage. Moreover, we annotate the key feature of the industrial process, ie, periodicity. Based on the proposed dataset, we introduce a period memory module and a sliding window inspection mechanism to effectively investigate the periodic information in a basic reconstruction model. Our framework leverages LoRA adapter to explore the effective migration of pretrained models, which are initially trained using synthetic data, into real-world scenarios. Our proposed dataset and method will fill the gap in the field of industrial video anomaly detection and drive the process of video understanding tasks as well as smart factory deployment.

Rethinking Clothes Changing Person ReID: Conflicts, Synthesis, and Optimization

Clothes-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims to retrieve images of the same person wearing different outfits. Mainstream researches focus on designing advanced model structures and strategies to capture identity information independent of clothing. However, the same-clothes discrimination as the standard ReID learning objective in CC-ReID is persistently ignored in previous researches. In this study, we dive into the relationship between standard and clothes-changing~(CC) learning objectives, and bring the inner conflicts between these two objectives to the fore. We try to magnify the proportion of CC training pairs by supplementing high-fidelity clothes-varying synthesis, produced by our proposed Clothes-Changing Diffusion model. By incorporating the synthetic images into CC-ReID model training, we observe a significant improvement under CC protocol. However, such improvement sacrifices the performance under the standard protocol, caused by the inner conflict between standard and CC. For conflict mitigation, we decouple these objectives and re-formulate CC-ReID learning as a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem. By effectively regularizing the gradient curvature across multiple objectives and introducing preference restrictions, our MOO solution surpasses the single-task training paradigm. Our framework is model-agnostic, and demonstrates superior performance under both CC and standard ReID protocols.

DBPF: A Framework for Efficient and Robust Dynamic Bin-Picking

Efficiency and reliability are critical in robotic bin-picking as they directly impact the productivity of automated industrial processes. However, traditional approaches, demanding static objects and fixed collisions, lead to deployment limitations, operational inefficiencies, and process unreliability. This paper introduces a Dynamic Bin-Picking Framework (DBPF) that challenges traditional static assumptions. The DBPF endows the robot with the reactivity to pick multiple moving arbitrary objects while avoiding dynamic obstacles, such as the moving bin. Combined with scene-level pose generation, the proposed pose selection metric leverages the Tendency-Aware Manipulability Network optimizing suction pose determination. Heuristic task-specific designs like velocity-matching, dynamic obstacle avoidance, and the resight policy, enhance the picking success rate and reliability. Empirical experiments demonstrate the importance of these components. Our method achieves an average 84% success rate, surpassing the 60% of the most comparable baseline, crucially, with zero collisions. Further evaluations under diverse dynamic scenarios showcase DBPF's robust performance in dynamic bin-picking. Results suggest that our framework offers a promising solution for efficient and reliable robotic bin-picking under dynamics.