Stochastic Trajectory Optimization for Demonstration Imitation

Humans often learn new skills by imitating the experts and gradually developing their proficiency. In this work, we introduce Stochastic Trajectory Optimization for Demonstration Imitation (STODI), a trajectory optimization framework for robots to imitate the shape of demonstration trajectories with improved dynamic performance. Consistent with the human learning process, demonstration imitation serves as an initial step, while trajectory optimization aims to enhance robot motion performance. By generating random noise and constructing proper cost functions, the STODI effectively explores and exploits generated noisy trajectories while preserving the demonstration shape characteristics. We employ three metrics to measure the similarity of trajectories in both the time and frequency domains to help with demonstration imitation. Theoretical analysis reveals relationships among these metrics, emphasizing the benefits of frequency-domain analysis for specific tasks. Experiments on a 7-DOF robotic arm in the PyBullet simulator validate the efficacy of the STODI framework, showcasing the improved optimization performance and stability compared to previous methods.

Imbalanced Graph-Level Anomaly Detection via Counterfactual Augmentation and Feature Learning

Graph-level anomaly detection (GLAD) has already gained significant importance and has become a popular field of study, attracting considerable attention across numerous downstream works. The core focus of this domain is to capture and highlight the anomalous information within given graph datasets. In most existing studies, anomalies are often the instances of few. The stark imbalance misleads current GLAD methods to focus on learning the patterns of normal graphs more, further impacting anomaly detection performance. Moreover, existing methods predominantly utilize the inherent features of nodes to identify anomalous graph patterns which is approved suboptimal according to our experiments. In this work, we propose an imbalanced GLAD method via counterfactual augmentation and feature learning. Specifically, we first construct anomalous samples based on counterfactual learning, aiming to expand and balance the datasets. Additionally, we construct a module based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which allows us to utilize degree attributes to complement the inherent attribute features of nodes. Then, we design an adaptive weight learning module to integrate features tailored to different datasets effectively to avoid indiscriminately treating all features as equivalent. Furthermore, extensive baseline experiments conducted on public datasets substantiate the robustness and effectiveness. Besides, we apply the model to brain disease datasets, which can prove the generalization capability of our work. The source code of our work is available online.

Learning from Sparse Offline Datasets via Conservative Density Estimation

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising direction for learning policies from pre-collected datasets without requiring further interactions with the environment. However, existing methods struggle to handle out-of-distribution (OOD) extrapolation errors, especially in sparse reward or scarce data settings. In this paper, we propose a novel training algorithm called Conservative Density Estimation (CDE), which addresses this challenge by explicitly imposing constraints on the state-action occupancy stationary distribution. CDE overcomes the limitations of existing approaches, such as the stationary distribution correction method, by addressing the support mismatch issue in marginal importance sampling. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the D4RL benchmark. Notably, CDE consistently outperforms baselines in challenging tasks with sparse rewards or insufficient data, demonstrating the advantages of our approach in addressing the extrapolation error problem in offline RL.

Resampling Stochastic Gradient Descent Cheaply for Efficient Uncertainty Quantification

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) or stochastic approximation has been widely used in model training and stochastic optimization. While there is a huge literature on analyzing its convergence, inference on the obtained solutions from SGD has only been recently studied, yet is important due to the growing need for uncertainty quantification. We investigate two computationally cheap resampling-based methods to construct confidence intervals for SGD solutions. One uses multiple, but few, SGDs in parallel via resampling with replacement from the data, and another operates this in an online fashion. Our methods can be regarded as enhancements of established bootstrap schemes to substantially reduce the computation effort in terms of resampling requirements, while at the same time bypassing the intricate mixing conditions in existing batching methods. We achieve these via a recent so-called cheap bootstrap idea and Berry-Esseen-type bound for SGD.

Discriminative Graph-level Anomaly Detection via Dual-students-teacher Model

Different from the current node-level anomaly detection task, the goal of graph-level anomaly detection is to find abnormal graphs that significantly differ from others in a graph set. Due to the scarcity of research on the work of graph-level anomaly detection, the detailed description of graph-level anomaly is insufficient. Furthermore, existing works focus on capturing anomalous graph information to learn better graph representations, but they ignore the importance of an effective anomaly score function for evaluating abnormal graphs. Thus, in this work, we first define anomalous graph information including node and graph property anomalies in a graph set and adopt node-level and graph-level information differences to identify them, respectively. Then, we introduce a discriminative graph-level anomaly detection framework with dual-students-teacher model, where the teacher model with a heuristic loss are trained to make graph representations more divergent. Then, two competing student models trained by normal and abnormal graphs respectively fit graph representations of the teacher model in terms of node-level and graph-level representation perspectives. Finally, we combine representation errors between two student models to discriminatively distinguish anomalous graphs. Extensive experiment analysis demonstrates that our method is effective for the graph-level anomaly detection task on graph datasets in the real world.

Multi-representations Space Separation based Graph-level Anomaly-aware Detection

Graph structure patterns are widely used to model different area data recently. How to detect anomalous graph information on these graph data has become a popular research problem. The objective of this research is centered on the particular issue that how to detect abnormal graphs within a graph set. The previous works have observed that abnormal graphs mainly show node-level and graph-level anomalies, but these methods equally treat two anomaly forms above in the evaluation of abnormal graphs, which is contrary to the fact that different types of abnormal graph data have different degrees in terms of node-level and graph-level anomalies. Furthermore, abnormal graphs that have subtle differences from normal graphs are easily escaped detection by the existing methods. Thus, we propose a multi-representations space separation based graph-level anomaly-aware detection framework in this paper. To consider the different importance of node-level and graph-level anomalies, we design an anomaly-aware module to learn the specific weight between them in the abnormal graph evaluation process. In addition, we learn strictly separate normal and abnormal graph representation spaces by four types of weighted graph representations against each other including anchor normal graphs, anchor abnormal graphs, training normal graphs, and training abnormal graphs. Based on the distance error between the graph representations of the test graph and both normal and abnormal graph representation spaces, we can accurately determine whether the test graph is anomalous. Our approach has been extensively evaluated against baseline methods using ten public graph datasets, and the results demonstrate its effectiveness.

A serial dual-channel library occupancy detection system based on Faster RCNN

The phenomenon of seat occupancy in university libraries is a prevalent issue. However, existing solutions, such as software-based seat reservations and sensors-based occupancy detection, have proven to be inadequate in effectively addressing this problem. In this study, we propose a novel approach: a serial dual-channel object detection model based on Faster RCNN. Furthermore, we develop a user-friendly Web interface and mobile APP to create a computer vision-based platform for library seat occupancy detection. To construct our dataset, we combine real-world data collec-tion with UE5 virtual reality. The results of our tests also demonstrate that the utilization of per-sonalized virtual dataset significantly enhances the performance of the convolutional neural net-work (CNN) in dedicated scenarios. The serial dual-channel detection model comprises three es-sential steps. Firstly, we employ Faster RCNN algorithm to determine whether a seat is occupied by an individual. Subsequently, we utilize an object classification algorithm based on transfer learning, to classify and identify images of unoccupied seats. This eliminates the need for manual judgment regarding whether a person is suspected of occupying a seat. Lastly, the Web interface and APP provide seat information to librarians and students respectively, enabling comprehensive services. By leveraging deep learning methodologies, this research effectively addresses the issue of seat occupancy in library systems. It significantly enhances the accuracy of seat occupancy recognition, reduces the computational resources required for training CNNs, and greatly improves the effi-ciency of library seat management.

Large-Scale Semi-Supervised Learning via Graph Structure Learning over High-Dense Points

We focus on developing a novel scalable graph-based semi-supervised learning (SSL) method for a small number of labeled data and a large amount of unlabeled data. Due to the lack of labeled data and the availability of large-scale unlabeled data, existing SSL methods usually encounter either suboptimal performance because of an improper graph or the high computational complexity of the large-scale optimization problem. In this paper, we propose to address both challenging problems by constructing a proper graph for graph-based SSL methods. Different from existing approaches, we simultaneously learn a small set of vertexes to characterize the high-dense regions of the input data and a graph to depict the relationships among these vertexes. A novel approach is then proposed to construct the graph of the input data from the learned graph of a small number of vertexes with some preferred properties. Without explicitly calculating the constructed graph of inputs, two transductive graph-based SSL approaches are presented with the computational complexity in linear with the number of input data. Extensive experiments on synthetic data and real datasets of varied sizes demonstrate that the proposed method is not only scalable for large-scale data, but also achieve good classification performance, especially for extremely small number of labels.

StacNAS: Towards stable and consistent optimization for differentiable Neural Architecture Search

Earlier methods for Neural Architecture Search were computationally expensive. Recently proposed Differentiable Neural Architecture Search algorithms such as DARTS can effectively speed up the computation. However, the current formulation relies on a relaxation of the original problem that leads to unstable and suboptimal solutions. We argue that these problems are caused by three fundamental reasons: (1) The difficulty of bi-level optimization; (2) Multicollinearity of correlated operations such as max pooling and average pooling; (3) The discrepancy between the optimization complexity of the search stage and the final training. In this paper, we propose a grouped variable pruning algorithm based on one-level optimization, which leads to a more stable and consistent optimization solution for differentiable NAS. Extensive experiments verify the superiority of the proposed method regarding both accuracy and stability. Our new approach obtains state-of-the-art accuracy on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet.