RoMeO: Robust Metric Visual Odometry

Visual odometry (VO) aims to estimate camera poses from visual inputs -- a fundamental building block for many applications such as VR/AR and robotics. This work focuses on monocular RGB VO where the input is a monocular RGB video without IMU or 3D sensors. Existing approaches lack robustness under this challenging scenario and fail to generalize to unseen data (especially outdoors); they also cannot recover metric-scale poses. We propose Robust Metric Visual Odometry (RoMeO), a novel method that resolves these issues leveraging priors from pre-trained depth models. RoMeO incorporates both monocular metric depth and multi-view stereo (MVS) models to recover metric-scale, simplify correspondence search, provide better initialization and regularize optimization. Effective strategies are proposed to inject noise during training and adaptively filter noisy depth priors, which ensure the robustness of RoMeO on in-the-wild data. As shown in Fig.1, RoMeO advances the state-of-the-art (SOTA) by a large margin across 6 diverse datasets covering both indoor and outdoor scenes. Compared to the current SOTA DPVO, RoMeO reduces the relative (align the trajectory scale with GT) and absolute trajectory errors both by >50%. The performance gain also transfers to the full SLAM pipeline (with global BA & loop closure). Code will be released upon acceptance.

L-MAGIC: Language Model Assisted Generation of Images with Coherence

In the current era of generative AI breakthroughs, generating panoramic scenes from a single input image remains a key challenge. Most existing methods use diffusion-based iterative or simultaneous multi-view inpainting. However, the lack of global scene layout priors leads to subpar outputs with duplicated objects (e.g., multiple beds in a bedroom) or requires time-consuming human text inputs for each view. We propose L-MAGIC, a novel method leveraging large language models for guidance while diffusing multiple coherent views of 360 degree panoramic scenes. L-MAGIC harnesses pre-trained diffusion and language models without fine-tuning, ensuring zero-shot performance. The output quality is further enhanced by super-resolution and multi-view fusion techniques. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the resulting panoramic scenes feature better scene layouts and perspective view rendering quality compared to related works, with >70% preference in human evaluations. Combined with conditional diffusion models, L-MAGIC can accept various input modalities, including but not limited to text, depth maps, sketches, and colored scripts. Applying depth estimation further enables 3D point cloud generation and dynamic scene exploration with fluid camera motion. Code is available at https://github.com/IntelLabs/MMPano. The video presentation is available at https://youtu.be/XDMNEzH4-Ec?list=PLG9Zyvu7iBa0-a7ccNLO8LjcVRAoMn57s.

Leveraging Unknown Objects to Construct Labeled-Unlabeled Meta-Relationships for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) addresses situation where an agent navigates to an unseen object that does not present in the training set. Previous works mainly train agent using seen objects with known labels, and ignore the seen objects without labels. In this paper, we introduce seen objects without labels, herein termed as ``unknown objects'', into training procedure to enrich the agent's knowledge base with distinguishable but previously overlooked information. Furthermore, we propose the label-wise meta-correlation module (LWMCM) to harness relationships among objects with and without labels, and obtain enhanced objects information. Specially, we propose target feature generator (TFG) to generate the features representation of the unlabeled target objects. Subsequently, the unlabeled object identifier (UOI) module assesses whether the unlabeled target object appears in the current observation frame captured by the camera and produces an adapted target features representation specific to the observed context. In meta contrastive feature modifier (MCFM), the target features is modified via approaching the features of objects within the observation frame while distancing itself from features of unobserved objects. Finally, the meta object-graph learner (MOGL) module is utilized to calculate the relationships among objects based on the features. Experiments conducted on AI2THOR and RoboTHOR platforms demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Distributed Swarm Learning for Edge Internet of Things

The rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the widespread deployment of smart IoT devices at wireless edge for collaborative machine learning tasks, ushering in a new era of edge learning. With a huge number of hardware-constrained IoT devices operating in resource-limited wireless networks, edge learning encounters substantial challenges, including communication and computation bottlenecks, device and data heterogeneity, security risks, privacy leakages, non-convex optimization, and complex wireless environments. To address these issues, this article explores a novel framework known as distributed swarm learning (DSL), which combines artificial intelligence and biological swarm intelligence in a holistic manner. By harnessing advanced signal processing and communications, DSL provides efficient solutions and robust tools for large-scale IoT at the edge of wireless networks.

Security Risks Concerns of Generative AI in the IoT

In an era where the Internet of Things (IoT) intersects increasingly with generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), this article scrutinizes the emergent security risks inherent in this integration. We explore how generative AI drives innovation in IoT and we analyze the potential for data breaches when using generative AI and the misuse of generative AI technologies in IoT ecosystems. These risks not only threaten the privacy and efficiency of IoT systems but also pose broader implications for trust and safety in AI-driven environments. The discussion in this article extends to strategic approaches for mitigating these risks, including the development of robust security protocols, the multi-layered security approaches, and the adoption of AI technological solutions. Through a comprehensive analysis, this article aims to shed light on the critical balance between embracing AI advancements and ensuring stringent security in IoT, providing insights into the future direction of these intertwined technologies.

RobustSentEmbed: Robust Sentence Embeddings Using Adversarial Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have consistently demonstrated outstanding performance across a diverse spectrum of natural language processing tasks. Nevertheless, despite their success with unseen data, current PLM-based representations often exhibit poor robustness in adversarial settings. In this paper, we introduce RobustSentEmbed, a self-supervised sentence embedding framework designed to improve both generalization and robustness in diverse text representation tasks and against a diverse set of adversarial attacks. Through the generation of high-risk adversarial perturbations and their utilization in a novel objective function, RobustSentEmbed adeptly learns high-quality and robust sentence embeddings. Our experiments confirm the superiority of RobustSentEmbed over state-of-the-art representations. Specifically, Our framework achieves a significant reduction in the success rate of various adversarial attacks, notably reducing the BERTAttack success rate by almost half (from 75.51\% to 38.81\%). The framework also yields improvements of 1.59\% and 0.23\% in semantic textual similarity tasks and various transfer tasks, respectively.

GIM: Learning Generalizable Image Matcher From Internet Videos

Image matching is a fundamental computer vision problem. While learning-based methods achieve state-of-the-art performance on existing benchmarks, they generalize poorly to in-the-wild images. Such methods typically need to train separate models for different scene types and are impractical when the scene type is unknown in advance. One of the underlying problems is the limited scalability of existing data construction pipelines, which limits the diversity of standard image matching datasets. To address this problem, we propose GIM, a self-training framework for learning a single generalizable model based on any image matching architecture using internet videos, an abundant and diverse data source. Given an architecture, GIM first trains it on standard domain-specific datasets and then combines it with complementary matching methods to create dense labels on nearby frames of novel videos. These labels are filtered by robust fitting, and then enhanced by propagating them to distant frames. The final model is trained on propagated data with strong augmentations. We also propose ZEB, the first zero-shot evaluation benchmark for image matching. By mixing data from diverse domains, ZEB can thoroughly assess the cross-domain generalization performance of different methods. Applying GIM consistently improves the zero-shot performance of 3 state-of-the-art image matching architectures; with 50 hours of YouTube videos, the relative zero-shot performance improves by 8.4%-18.1%. GIM also enables generalization to extreme cross-domain data such as Bird Eye View (BEV) images of projected 3D point clouds (Fig. 1(c)). More importantly, our single zero-shot model consistently outperforms domain-specific baselines when evaluated on downstream tasks inherent to their respective domains. The video presentation is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU_MJLD8LeY.

I can't see it but I can Fine-tune it: On Encrypted Fine-tuning of Transformers using Fully Homomorphic Encryption

In today's machine learning landscape, fine-tuning pretrained transformer models has emerged as an essential technique, particularly in scenarios where access to task-aligned training data is limited. However, challenges surface when data sharing encounters obstacles due to stringent privacy regulations or user apprehension regarding personal information disclosure. Earlier works based on secure multiparty computation (SMC) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) for privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) focused more on privacy-preserving inference than privacy-preserving training. In response, we introduce BlindTuner, a privacy-preserving fine-tuning system that enables transformer training exclusively on homomorphically encrypted data for image classification. Our extensive experimentation validates BlindTuner's effectiveness by demonstrating comparable accuracy to non-encrypted models. Notably, our findings highlight a substantial speed enhancement of 1.5x to 600x over previous work in this domain.

MedBlindTuner: Towards Privacy-preserving Fine-tuning on Biomedical Images with Transformers and Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Advancements in machine learning (ML) have significantly revolutionized medical image analysis, prompting hospitals to rely on external ML services. However, the exchange of sensitive patient data, such as chest X-rays, poses inherent privacy risks when shared with third parties. Addressing this concern, we propose MedBlindTuner, a privacy-preserving framework leveraging fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and a data-efficient image transformer (DEiT). MedBlindTuner enables the training of ML models exclusively on FHE-encrypted medical images. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that MedBlindTuner achieves comparable accuracy to models trained on non-encrypted images, offering a secure solution for outsourcing ML computations while preserving patient data privacy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that uses data-efficient image transformers and fully homomorphic encryption in this domain.

CorresNeRF: Image Correspondence Priors for Neural Radiance Fields

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have achieved impressive results in novel view synthesis and surface reconstruction tasks. However, their performance suffers under challenging scenarios with sparse input views. We present CorresNeRF, a novel method that leverages image correspondence priors computed by off-the-shelf methods to supervise NeRF training. We design adaptive processes for augmentation and filtering to generate dense and high-quality correspondences. The correspondences are then used to regularize NeRF training via the correspondence pixel reprojection and depth loss terms. We evaluate our methods on novel view synthesis and surface reconstruction tasks with density-based and SDF-based NeRF models on different datasets. Our method outperforms previous methods in both photometric and geometric metrics. We show that this simple yet effective technique of using correspondence priors can be applied as a plug-and-play module across different NeRF variants. The project page is at https://yxlao.github.io/corres-nerf.