Towards Autonomous Indoor Parking: A Globally Consistent Semantic SLAM System and A Semantic Localization Subsystem

We propose a globally consistent semantic SLAM system (GCSLAM) and a semantic-fusion localization subsystem (SF-Loc), which achieves accurate semantic mapping and robust localization in complex parking lots. Visual cameras (front-view and surround-view), IMU, and wheel encoder form the input sensor configuration of our system. The first part of our work is GCSLAM. GCSLAM introduces a novel factor graph for the optimization of poses and semantic map, which incorporates innovative error terms based on multi-sensor data and BEV (bird's-eye view) semantic information. Additionally, GCSLAM integrates a Global Slot Management module that stores and manages parking slot observations. SF-Loc is the second part of our work, which leverages the semantic map built by GCSLAM to conduct map-based localization. SF-Loc integrates registration results and odometry poses with a novel factor graph. Our system demonstrates superior performance over existing SLAM on two real-world datasets, showing excellent capabilities in robust global localization and precise semantic mapping.

MambaPupil: Bidirectional Selective Recurrent model for Event-based Eye tracking

Event-based eye tracking has shown great promise with the high temporal resolution and low redundancy provided by the event camera. However, the diversity and abruptness of eye movement patterns, including blinking, fixating, saccades, and smooth pursuit, pose significant challenges for eye localization. To achieve a stable event-based eye-tracking system, this paper proposes a bidirectional long-term sequence modeling and time-varying state selection mechanism to fully utilize contextual temporal information in response to the variability of eye movements. Specifically, the MambaPupil network is proposed, which consists of the multi-layer convolutional encoder to extract features from the event representations, a bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and a Linear Time-Varying State Space Module (LTV-SSM), to selectively capture contextual correlation from the forward and backward temporal relationship. Furthermore, the Bina-rep is utilized as a compact event representation, and the tailor-made data augmentation, called as Event-Cutout, is proposed to enhance the model's robustness by applying spatial random masking to the event image. The evaluation on the ThreeET-plus benchmark shows the superior performance of the MambaPupil, which secured the 1st place in CVPR'2024 AIS Event-based Eye Tracking challenge.

Event-Based Eye Tracking. AIS 2024 Challenge Survey

This survey reviews the AIS 2024 Event-Based Eye Tracking (EET) Challenge. The task of the challenge focuses on processing eye movement recorded with event cameras and predicting the pupil center of the eye. The challenge emphasizes efficient eye tracking with event cameras to achieve good task accuracy and efficiency trade-off. During the challenge period, 38 participants registered for the Kaggle competition, and 8 teams submitted a challenge factsheet. The novel and diverse methods from the submitted factsheets are reviewed and analyzed in this survey to advance future event-based eye tracking research.

DNABERT-S: Learning Species-Aware DNA Embedding with Genome Foundation Models

Effective DNA embedding remains crucial in genomic analysis, particularly in scenarios lacking labeled data for model fine-tuning, despite the significant advancements in genome foundation models. A prime example is metagenomics binning, a critical process in microbiome research that aims to group DNA sequences by their species from a complex mixture of DNA sequences derived from potentially thousands of distinct, often uncharacterized species. To fill the lack of effective DNA embedding models, we introduce DNABERT-S, a genome foundation model that specializes in creating species-aware DNA embeddings. To encourage effective embeddings to error-prone long-read DNA sequences, we introduce Manifold Instance Mixup (MI-Mix), a contrastive objective that mixes the hidden representations of DNA sequences at randomly selected layers and trains the model to recognize and differentiate these mixed proportions at the output layer. We further enhance it with the proposed Curriculum Contrastive Learning (C$^2$LR) strategy. Empirical results on 18 diverse datasets showed DNABERT-S's remarkable performance. It outperforms the top baseline's performance in 10-shot species classification with just a 2-shot training while doubling the Adjusted Rand Index (ARI) in species clustering and substantially increasing the number of correctly identified species in metagenomics binning. The code, data, and pre-trained model are publicly available at https://github.com/Zhihan1996/DNABERT_S.

CSPRD: A Financial Policy Retrieval Dataset for Chinese Stock Market

In recent years, great advances in pre-trained language models (PLMs) have sparked considerable research focus and achieved promising performance on the approach of dense passage retrieval, which aims at retrieving relative passages from massive corpus with given questions. However, most of existing datasets mainly benchmark the models with factoid queries of general commonsense, while specialised fields such as finance and economics remain unexplored due to the deficiency of large-scale and high-quality datasets with expert annotations. In this work, we propose a new task, policy retrieval, by introducing the Chinese Stock Policy Retrieval Dataset (CSPRD), which provides 700+ prospectus passages labeled by experienced experts with relevant articles from 10k+ entries in our collected Chinese policy corpus. Experiments on lexical, embedding and fine-tuned bi-encoder models show the effectiveness of our proposed CSPRD yet also suggests ample potential for improvement. Our best performing baseline achieves 56.1% MRR@10, 28.5% NDCG@10, 37.5% Recall@10 and 80.6% Precision@10 on dev set.

Rgtsvm: Support Vector Machines on a GPU in R

Rgtsvm provides a fast and flexible support vector machine (SVM) implementation for the R language. The distinguishing feature of Rgtsvm is that support vector classification and support vector regression tasks are implemented on a graphical processing unit (GPU), allowing the libraries to scale to millions of examples with >100-fold improvement in performance over existing implementations. Nevertheless, Rgtsvm retains feature parity and has an interface that is compatible with the popular e1071 SVM package in R. Altogether, Rgtsvm enables large SVM models to be created by both experienced and novice practitioners.