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Dashboard cameras (dashcams) record millions of driving videos daily, offering a valuable potential data source for various applications, including driving map production and updates. A necessary step for utilizing these dashcam data involves the estimation of camera poses. However, the low-quality images captured by dashcams, characterized by motion blurs and dynamic objects, pose challenges for existing image-matching methods in accurately estimating camera poses. In this study, we propose a precise pose estimation method for dashcam images, leveraging the inherent camera motion prior. Typically, image sequences captured by dash cameras exhibit pronounced motion prior, such as forward movement or lateral turns, which serve as essential cues for correspondence estimation. Building upon this observation, we devise a pose regression module aimed at learning camera motion prior, subsequently integrating these prior into both correspondences and pose estimation processes. The experiment shows that, in real dashcams dataset, our method is 22% better than the baseline for pose estimation in AUC5\textdegree, and it can estimate poses for 19% more images with less reprojection error in Structure from Motion (SfM).

Research suggests the potential of employing VR to elicit awe experiences, thereby promoting well-being. Building upon theories related to the sublime and embodiment, we designed three VR scenes to evaluate the effectiveness of sublime and embodied design elements in invoking awe experiences. We conducted a within-subject study involving 28 young adults who experienced the three VR designs. Results demonstrated that the VR design with sublime elements significantly elicited more intense awe experiences compared to the one without, while adding embodied elements did not enhance the intensity of awe. Qualitative interviews revealed critical design elements (e.g., the obscure event should be reasonable) and their underlying mechanisms (e.g., leading to feelings of enlightenment) in invoking awe experiences. We further discuss considerations and implications for the design of effective awe-inspiring VR applications., Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures

VSG control has emerged as a crucial technology for integrating renewable energy sources. However, renewable energy have limited tolerance to overcurrent, necessitating the implementation of current limiting (CL)strategies to mitigate the overcurrent. The introduction of different CL strategies can have varying impacts on the system. While previous studies have discussed the effects of different CL strategies on the system, but they lack intuitive and explicit explanations. Meanwhile, previous CL strategy have failed to effectively ensure the stability of the system. In this paper, the Equal Proportional Area Criterion (EPAC) method is employed to intuitively explain how different CL strategies affect transient stability. Based on this, an effective current limiting strategy is proposed. Simulations are conducted in MATLAB/Simulink to validate the proposed strategy. The simulation results demonstrate that, the proposed effective CL strategy exhibits superior stability., Comment: 2024 IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition (ECCE)

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) achieve impressive rendering performance by learning volumetric 3D representation from several images of different views. However, it is difficult to reconstruct a sharp NeRF from blurry input as it often occurs in the wild. To solve this problem, we propose a novel Efficient Event-Enhanced NeRF (E$^3$NeRF) by utilizing the combination of RGB images and event streams. To effectively introduce event streams into the neural volumetric representation learning process, we propose an event-enhanced blur rendering loss and an event rendering loss, which guide the network via modeling the real blur process and event generation process, respectively. Specifically, we leverage spatial-temporal information from the event stream to evenly distribute learning attention over temporal blur while simultaneously focusing on blurry texture through the spatial attention. Moreover, a camera pose estimation framework for real-world data is built with the guidance of the events to generalize the method to practical applications. Compared to previous image-based or event-based NeRF, our framework makes more profound use of the internal relationship between events and images. Extensive experiments on both synthetic data and real-world data demonstrate that E$^3$NeRF can effectively learn a sharp NeRF from blurry images, especially in non-uniform motion and low-light scenes.

Precision measurements of the beam pattern response are needed to predict the response of a radio telescope. Mapping the beam of a low frequency radio array presents a unique challenge and science cases such as the observation of the 21\,cm line at high redshift have demanding requirements. Drone-based systems offer the unique potential for a measurement which is entirely under experimenter control, but progress has been paced by practical implementation challenges. Previously, a prototype drone system, called the External Calibrator for Hydrogen Observatories (ECHO), demonstrated good performance in making a complete hemispherical beam measurement. This paper reports updates to the system focusing on performance of a new drone platform, minimizing interference from the drone, and a new transmitter.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) achieves impressive 3D representation learning and novel view synthesis results with high-quality multi-view images as input. However, motion blur in images often occurs in low-light and high-speed motion scenes, which significantly degrades the reconstruction quality of NeRF. Previous deblurring NeRF methods struggle to estimate pose and lighting changes during the exposure time, making them unable to accurately model the motion blur. The bio-inspired event camera measuring intensity changes with high temporal resolution makes up this information deficiency. In this paper, we propose Event-driven Bundle Adjustment for Deblurring Neural Radiance Fields (EBAD-NeRF) to jointly optimize the learnable poses and NeRF parameters by leveraging the hybrid event-RGB data. An intensity-change-metric event loss and a photo-metric blur loss are introduced to strengthen the explicit modeling of camera motion blur. Experiments on both synthetic and real-captured data demonstrate that EBAD-NeRF can obtain accurate camera trajectory during the exposure time and learn a sharper 3D representations compared to prior works., Comment: Accepted by 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM 2024)

In the mobile internet era, the Online Food Ordering Service (OFOS) emerges as an integral component of inclusive finance owing to the convenience it brings to people. OFOS platforms offer dynamic allocation incentives to users and merchants through diverse marketing campaigns to encourage payments while maintaining the platforms' budget efficiency. Despite significant progress, the marketing domain continues to face two primary challenges: (i) how to allocate a limited budget with greater efficiency, demanding precision in predicting users' monotonic response (i.e. sensitivity) to incentives, and (ii) ensuring spatio-temporal adaptability and robustness in diverse marketing campaigns across different times and locations. To address these issues, we propose a Constrained Monotonic Adaptive Network (CoMAN) method for spatio-temporal perception within marketing pricing. Specifically, we capture spatio-temporal preferences within attribute features through two foundational spatio-temporal perception modules. To further enhance catching the user sensitivity differentials to incentives across varied times and locations, we design modules for learning spatio-temporal convexity and concavity as well as for expressing sensitivity functions. CoMAN can achieve a more efficient allocation of incentive investments during pricing, thus increasing the conversion rate and orders while maintaining budget efficiency. Extensive offline and online experimental results within our diverse marketing campaigns demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach while outperforming the monotonic state-of-the-art method., Comment: 7 pages

Since the secrecy rate (SR) performance improvement obtained by secure directional modulation (DM) network is limited, an active intelligent reflective surface (IRS)-assisted DM network is considered to attain a high SR. To address the SR maximization problem, a novel method based on Lagrangian dual transform and closed-form fractional programming algorithm (LDT-CFFP) is proposed, where the solutions to base station (BS) beamforming vectors and IRS reflection coefficient matrix are achieved. However, the computational complexity of LDT-CFFP method is high . To reduce its complexity, a blocked IRS-assisted DM network is designed. To meet the requirements of the network performance, a power allocation (PA) strategy is proposed and adopted in the system. Specifically, the system power between BS and IRS, as well as the transmission power for confidential messages (CM) and artificial noise (AN) from the BS, are allocated separately. Then we put forward null-space projection (NSP) method, maximum-ratio-reflecting (MRR) algorithm and PA strategy (NSP-MRR-PA) to solve the SR maximization problem. The CF solutions to BS beamforming vectors and IRS reflection coefficient matrix are respectively attained via NSP and MRR algorithms. For the PA factors, we take advantage of exhaustive search (ES) algorithm, particle swarm optimization (PSO) and simulated annealing (SA) algorithm to search for the solutions. From simulation results, it is verified that the LDT-CFFP method derives a higher SR gain over NSP-MRR-PA method. For NSP-MRR-PA method, the number of IRS units in each block possesses a significant SR performance. In addition, the application PA strategies, namely ES, PSO, SA methods outperforms the other PA strategies with fixed PA factors., Comment: Directional modulation, active intelligent reflective surface, Lagrangian dual transformation, fractional programming, power allocation

With the benefit of deep learning techniques, recent researches have made significant progress in image compression artifacts reduction. Despite their improved performances, prevailing methods only focus on learning a mapping from the compressed image to the original one but ignore the intrinsic attributes of the given compressed images, which greatly harms the performance of downstream parsing tasks. Different from these methods, we propose to decouple the intrinsic attributes into two complementary features for artifacts reduction,ie, the compression-insensitive features to regularize the high-level semantic representations during training and the compression-sensitive features to be aware of the compression degree. To achieve this, we first employ adversarial training to regularize the compressed and original encoded features for retaining high-level semantics, and we then develop the compression quality-aware feature encoder for compression-sensitive features. Based on these dual complementary features, we propose a Dual Awareness Guidance Network (DAGN) to utilize these awareness features as transformation guidance during the decoding phase. In our proposed DAGN, we develop a cross-feature fusion module to maintain the consistency of compression-insensitive features by fusing compression-insensitive features into the artifacts reduction baseline. Our method achieves an average 2.06 dB PSNR gains on BSD500, outperforming state-of-the-art methods, and only requires 29.7 ms to process one image on BSD500. Besides, the experimental results on LIVE1 and LIU4K also demonstrate the efficiency, effectiveness, and superiority of the proposed method in terms of quantitative metrics, visual quality, and downstream machine vision tasks., Comment: Accepted by Transactions on Image Processing

As one of the emerging challenges in Automated Machine Learning, the Hardware-aware Neural Architecture Search (HW-NAS) tasks can be treated as black-box multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs). An important application of HW-NAS is real-time semantic segmentation, which plays a pivotal role in autonomous driving scenarios. The HW-NAS for real-time semantic segmentation inherently needs to balance multiple optimization objectives, including model accuracy, inference speed, and hardware-specific considerations. Despite its importance, benchmarks have yet to be developed to frame such a challenging task as multi-objective optimization. To bridge the gap, we introduce a tailored streamline to transform the task of HW-NAS for real-time semantic segmentation into standard MOPs. Building upon the streamline, we present a benchmark test suite, CitySeg/MOP, comprising fifteen MOPs derived from the Cityscapes dataset. The CitySeg/MOP test suite is integrated into the EvoXBench platform to provide seamless interfaces with various programming languages (e.g., Python and MATLAB) for instant fitness evaluations. We comprehensively assessed the CitySeg/MOP test suite on various multi-objective evolutionary algorithms, showcasing its versatility and practicality. Source codes are available at https://github.com/EMI-Group/evoxbench., Comment: GECCO 2024

Spike cameras, leveraging spike-based integration sampling and high temporal resolution, offer distinct advantages over standard cameras. However, existing approaches reliant on spike cameras often assume optimal illumination, a condition frequently unmet in real-world scenarios. To address this, we introduce SpikeNeRF, the first work that derives a NeRF-based volumetric scene representation from spike camera data. Our approach leverages NeRF's multi-view consistency to establish robust self-supervision, effectively eliminating erroneous measurements and uncovering coherent structures within exceedingly noisy input amidst diverse real-world illumination scenarios. The framework comprises two core elements: a spike generation model incorporating an integrate-and-fire neuron layer and parameters accounting for non-idealities, such as threshold variation, and a spike rendering loss capable of generalizing across varying illumination conditions. We describe how to effectively optimize neural radiance fields to render photorealistic novel views from the novel continuous spike stream, demonstrating advantages over other vision sensors in certain scenes. Empirical evaluations conducted on both real and novel realistically simulated sequences affirm the efficacy of our methodology. The dataset and source code are released at https://github.com/BIT-Vision/SpikeNeRF., Comment: Accepted by CVPR 2024

In this paper, a hybrid IRS-aided amplify-and-forward (AF) relay wireless network is put forward, where the hybrid IRS is made up of passive and active elements. For maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), a low-complexity method based on successive convex approximation and fractional programming (LC-SCA-FP) is proposed to jointly optimize the beamforming matrix at AF relay and the reflecting coefficient matrices at IRS. Simulation results verify that the rate achieved by the proposed LC-SCA-FP method surpass those of the benchmark schemes, namely the passive IRS-aided AF relay and only AF relay network., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2301.02858

To alleviate the cost of regression testing in continuous integration (CI), a large number of machine learning-based (ML-based) test case prioritization techniques have been proposed. However, it is yet unknown how they perform under the same experimental setup, because they are evaluated on different datasets with different metrics. To bridge this gap, we conduct the first comprehensive study on these ML-based techniques in this paper. We investigate the performance of 11 representative ML-based prioritization techniques for CI on 11 open-source subjects and obtain a series of findings. For example, the performance of the techniques changes across CI cycles, mainly resulting from the changing amount of training data, instead of code evolution and test removal/addition. Based on the findings, we give some actionable suggestions on enhancing the effectiveness of ML-based techniques, e.g., pretraining a prioritization technique with cross-subject data to get it thoroughly trained and then finetuning it with within-subject data dramatically improves its performance. In particular, the pretrained MART achieves state-of-the-art performance, producing the optimal sequence on 80% subjects, while the existing best technique, the original MART, only produces the optimal sequence on 50% subjects., Comment: This paper has been accepted by ICSME 2023

Due to its intrinsic ability to combat the double fading effect, the active intelligent reflective surface (IRS) becomes popular. The main feature of active IRS must be supplied by power, and the problem of how to allocate the total power between base station (BS) and IRS to fully explore the rate gain achieved by power allocation (PA) to remove the rate gap between existing PA strategies and optimal exhaustive search (ES) arises naturally. First, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) expression is derived to be a function of PA factor beta [0, 1]. Then, to improve the rate performance of the conventional gradient ascent (GA), an equal-spacing-multiple-point-initialization GA (ESMPI-GA) method is proposed. Due to its slow linear convergence from iterative GA, the proposed ESMPI-GA is high-complexity. Eventually, to reduce this high complexity, a low-complexity closed-form PA method with third-order Taylor expansion (TTE) centered at point beta0 = 0.5 is proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed ESMPI-GA and TTE obviously outperform existing methods like equal PA.

Virtual Reality (VR) broadcasting has seen widespread adoption in major sports events, attributed to its ability to generate a sense of presence, curiosity, and excitement among viewers. However, we have noticed that still shots reveal a limitation in the movement of VR cameras and hinder the VR viewing experience in current VR sports broadcasts. This paper aims to bridge this gap by engaging in a quantitative user analysis to explore the design and impact of dynamic VR shots on viewing experiences. We conducted two user studies in a digital hockey game twin environment and asked participants to evaluate their viewing experience through two questionnaires. Our findings suggested that the viewing experiences demonstrated no notable disparity between still and moving shots for single clips. However, when considering entire events, moving shots improved the viewer's immersive experience, with no notable increase in sickness compared to still shots. We further discuss the benefits of integrating moving shots into VR sports broadcasts and present a set of design considerations and potential improvements for future VR sports broadcasting.

Recently, deep learning-based techniques have shown promising performance on various tasks related to software engineering. For these learning-based approaches to perform well, obtaining high-quality data is one fundamental and crucial issue. The comment updating task is an emerging software engineering task aiming at automatically updating the corresponding comments based on changes in source code. However, datasets for the comment updating tasks are usually crawled from committed versions in open source software repositories such as GitHub, where there is lack of quality control of comments. In this paper, we focus on cleaning existing comment updating datasets with considering some properties of the comment updating process in software development. We propose a semantic and overlapping-aware approach named CupCleaner (Comment UPdating's CLEANER) to achieve this purpose. Specifically, we calculate a score based on semantics and overlapping information of the code and comments. Based on the distribution of the scores, we filter out the data with low scores in the tail of the distribution to get rid of possible unclean data. We first conducted a human evaluation on the noise data and high-quality data identified by CupCleaner. The results show that the human ratings of the noise data identified by CupCleaner are significantly lower. Then, we applied our data cleaning approach to the training and validation sets of three existing comment updating datasets while keeping the test set unchanged. Our experimental results show that even after filtering out over 30\% of the data using CupCleaner, there is still an improvement in all performance metrics. The experimental results on the cleaned test set also suggest that CupCleaner may provide help for constructing datasets for updating-related tasks.

Learning multi-label image recognition with incomplete annotation is gaining popularity due to its superior performance and significant labor savings when compared to training with fully labeled datasets. Existing literature mainly focuses on label completion and co-occurrence learning while facing difficulties with the most common single-positive label manner. To tackle this problem, we present a semantic contrastive bootstrapping (Scob) approach to gradually recover the cross-object relationships by introducing class activation as semantic guidance. With this learning guidance, we then propose a recurrent semantic masked transformer to extract iconic object-level representations and delve into the contrastive learning problems on multi-label classification tasks. We further propose a bootstrapping framework in an Expectation-Maximization fashion that iteratively optimizes the network parameters and refines semantic guidance to alleviate possible disturbance caused by wrong semantic guidance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed joint learning framework surpasses the state-of-the-art models by a large margin on four public multi-label image recognition benchmarks. Codes can be found at https://github.com/iCVTEAM/Scob., Comment: 18 pages, 11 figures, To Appear in IJCV 2023

Few-shot learning aims to recognize novel queries with limited support samples by learning from base knowledge. Recent progress in this setting assumes that the base knowledge and novel query samples are distributed in the same domains, which are usually infeasible for realistic applications. Toward this issue, we propose to address the cross-domain few-shot learning problem where only extremely few samples are available in target domains. Under this realistic setting, we focus on the fast adaptation capability of meta-learners by proposing an effective dual adaptive representation alignment approach. In our approach, a prototypical feature alignment is first proposed to recalibrate support instances as prototypes and reproject these prototypes with a differentiable closed-form solution. Therefore feature spaces of learned knowledge can be adaptively transformed to query spaces by the cross-instance and cross-prototype relations. Besides the feature alignment, we further present a normalized distribution alignment module, which exploits prior statistics of query samples for solving the covariant shifts among the support and query samples. With these two modules, a progressive meta-learning framework is constructed to perform the fast adaptation with extremely few-shot samples while maintaining its generalization capabilities. Experimental evidence demonstrates our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results on 4 CDFSL benchmarks and 4 fine-grained cross-domain benchmarks., Comment: 13 pages; Accepted by IEEE T-PAMI

In this paper, an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-and-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted two-way amplify-and-forward (AF) relay network in maritime Internet of Things (IoT) is proposed, where ship1 ($\text{S}_1$) and ship2 ($\text{S}_2$) can be viewed as data collecting centers. To enhance the message exchange rate between $\text{S}_1$ and $\text{S}_2$, a problem of maximizing minimum rate is cast, where the variables, namely AF relay beamforming matrix and IRS phase shifts of two time slots, need to be optimized. To achieve a maximum rate, a low-complexity alternately iterative (AI) scheme based on zero forcing and successive convex approximation (LC-ZF-SCA) algorithm is presented. To obtain a significant rate enhancement, a high-performance AI method based on one step, semidefinite programming and penalty SCA (ONS-SDP-PSCA) is proposed. Simulation results show that by the proposed LC-ZF-SCA and ONS-SDP-PSCA methods, the rate of the IRS-and-UAV-assisted AF relay network surpass those of with random phase and only AF relay networks. Moreover, ONS-SDP-PSCA perform better than LC-ZF-SCA in aspect of rate.

The sensitivity of deep neural networks to compressed images hinders their usage in many real applications, which means classification networks may fail just after taking a screenshot and saving it as a compressed file. In this paper, we argue that neglected disposable coding parameters stored in compressed files could be picked up to reduce the sensitivity of deep neural networks to compressed images. Specifically, we resort to using one of the representative parameters, quantization steps, to facilitate image classification. Firstly, based on quantization steps, we propose a novel quantization aware confidence (QAC), which is utilized as sample weights to reduce the influence of quantization on network training. Secondly, we utilize quantization steps to alleviate the variance of feature distributions, where a quantization aware batch normalization (QABN) is proposed to replace batch normalization of classification networks. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method significantly improves the performance of classification networks on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet. The code is released on https://github.com/LiMaPKU/QSAM.git

Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims at learning to classify new classes continually from limited samples without forgetting the old classes. The mainstream framework tackling FSCIL is first to adopt the cross-entropy (CE) loss for training at the base session, then freeze the feature extractor to adapt to new classes. However, in this work, we find that the CE loss is not ideal for the base session training as it suffers poor class separation in terms of representations, which further degrades generalization to novel classes. One tempting method to mitigate this problem is to apply an additional naive supervised contrastive learning (SCL) in the base session. Unfortunately, we find that although SCL can create a slightly better representation separation among different base classes, it still struggles to separate base classes and new classes. Inspired by the observations made, we propose Semantic-Aware Virtual Contrastive model (SAVC), a novel method that facilitates separation between new classes and base classes by introducing virtual classes to SCL. These virtual classes, which are generated via pre-defined transformations, not only act as placeholders for unseen classes in the representation space, but also provide diverse semantic information. By learning to recognize and contrast in the fantasy space fostered by virtual classes, our SAVC significantly boosts base class separation and novel class generalization, achieving new state-of-the-art performance on the three widely-used FSCIL benchmark datasets. Code is available at: https://github.com/zysong0113/SAVC., Comment: Accepted by CVPR 2023

Runtime-tunable context-dependent network compression would make mobile deep learning (DL) adaptable to often varying resource availability, input "difficulty", or user needs. The existing compression techniques significantly reduce the memory, processing, and energy tax of DL, yet, the resulting models tend to be permanently impaired, sacrificing the inference power for reduced resource usage. The existing tunable compression approaches, on the other hand, require expensive re-training, do not support arbitrary strategies for adapting the compression and do not provide mobile-ready implementations. In this paper we present Mobiprox, a framework enabling mobile DL with flexible precision. Mobiprox implements tunable approximations of tensor operations and enables runtime-adaptable approximation of individual network layers. A profiler and a tuner included with Mobiprox identify the most promising neural network approximation configurations leading to the desired inference quality with the minimal use of resources. Furthermore, we develop control strategies that depending on contextual factors, such as the input data difficulty, dynamically adjust the approximation levels across a mobile DL model's layers. We implement Mobiprox in Android OS and through experiments in diverse mobile domains, including human activity recognition and spoken keyword detection, demonstrate that it can save up to 15% system-wide energy with a minimal impact on the inference accuracy., Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures. IEEE Internet of Things Journal (2024)

Metastable water in negative pressure can provide giant passive driving pressure up to several megapascals for efficient evaporation-driven flow, however, the practical applications with negative pressure are rare due to the challenges of generating and maintaining large negative pressure. In this work, we report a novel structure with thin hydrogel films as evaporation surfaces and robust porous substrates as the supports, and obtain a high negative pressure of -1.61 MPa through water evaporation. Molecular dynamics simulations elucidate the essential role of strong interaction between water molecules and polymer chains in generating the negative pressure. With such a large negative pressure, we demonstrate a streaming potential generator that spontaneously converts environmental energy into electricity and outputs a voltage of 1.06 V. Moreover, we propose a "negative pressure heat pipe" for the first time, which achieves a high heat transfer density of 11.2 kW cm-2 with a flow length of 1 m, showing the potential of negative pressure in efficient heat utilization and transfer., Comment: 43 pages, 18 figures

Fine-grained visual parsing, including fine-grained part segmentation and fine-grained object recognition, has attracted considerable critical attention due to its importance in many real-world applications, e.g., agriculture, remote sensing, and space technologies. Predominant research efforts tackle these fine-grained sub-tasks following different paradigms, while the inherent relations between these tasks are neglected. Moreover, given most of the research remains fragmented, we conduct an in-depth study of the advanced work from a new perspective of learning the part relationship. In this perspective, we first consolidate recent research and benchmark syntheses with new taxonomies. Based on this consolidation, we revisit the universal challenges in fine-grained part segmentation and recognition tasks and propose new solutions by part relationship learning for these important challenges. Furthermore, we conclude several promising lines of research in fine-grained visual parsing for future research., Comment: Survey for fine-grained part segmentation and object recognition; Accepted by Machine Intelligence Research (MIR, 2024)