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1. Trajectory prediction with latent belief energy-based model

   Pang, B. ; Zhao, T. ; Xie, X. ; Wu, Y. N. ( April 2021 , IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition)

   Human trajectory prediction is critical for autonomous platforms like self-driving cars or social robots. We present a latent belief energy-based model (LB-EBM) for diverse human trajectory forecast. LB-EBM is a probabilistic model with cost function defined in the latent space to account for the movement history and social context. The low dimensionality of the latent space and the high expressivity of the EBM make it easy for the model to capture the multimodality of pedestrian trajectory distributions. LB-EBM is learned from expert demonstrations (i.e., human trajectories) projected into the latent space. Sampling from or optimizing the learned LB-EBM yields amore »belief vector which is used to make a path plan, which then in turn helps to predict a long-range trajectory. The effectiveness of LB-EBM and the two-step approach are supported by strong empirical results. Our model is able to make accurate, multi-modal, and social compliant trajectory predictions and improves over prior state-of-the-arts performance on the Stanford Drone trajectory prediction benchmark by 10:9% and on the ETH-UCY benchmark by 27:6%.« less
2. Learning multi-layer latent variable model with short run MCMC inference dynamics

   Nijkamp, E. ; Pang, B. ; Han, T. ; Zhou, L. ; Zhu, S. C. ; Wu, Y. N. ( January 2021 , European Conference on Computer Vision)

   This paper studies the fundamental problem of learning deep generative models that consist of multiple layers of latent variables organized in top-down architectures. Such models have high expressivity and allow for learning hierarchical representations. Learning such a generative model requires inferring the latent variables for each training example based on the posterior distribution of these latent variables. The inference typically requires Markov chain Monte Caro (MCMC) that can be time consuming. In this paper, we propose to use noise initialized non-persistent short run MCMC, such as nite step Langevin dynamics initialized from the prior distribution of the latent variables, asmore »an approximate inference engine, where the step size of the Langevin dynamics is variationally optimized by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the distribution produced by the short run MCMC and the posterior distribution. Our experiments show that the proposed method outperforms variational auto-encoder (VAE) in terms of reconstruction error and synthesis quality. The advantage of the proposed method is that it is simple and automatic without the need to design an inference model.« less
3. Sequential stratified regeneration: MCMC for large state spaces with an application to subgraph count estimation

   Teixeira, Carlos HC ( April 2022 , Data mining and knowledge discovery)

   This work considers the general task of estimating the sum of a bounded function over the edges of a graph, given neighborhood query access and where access to the entire network is prohibitively expensive. To estimate this sum, prior work proposes Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods that use random walks started at some seed vertex and whose equilibrium distribution is the uniform distribution over all edges, eliminating the need to iterate over all edges. Unfortunately, these existing estimators are not scalable to massive real-world graphs. In this paper, we introduce Ripple, an MCMC-based estimator that achieves unprecedented scalability bymore »stratifying the Markov chain state space into ordered strata with a new technique that we denote sequential stratified regenerations. We show that the Ripple estimator is consistent, highly parallelizable, and scales well. We empirically evaluate our method by applying Ripple to the task of estimating connected, induced subgraph counts given some input graph. Therein, we demonstrate that Ripple is accurate and can estimate counts of up to 12-node subgraphs, which is a task at a scale that has been considered unreachable, not only by prior MCMC-based methods but also by other sampling approaches. For instance, in this target application, we present results in which the Markov chain state space is as large as 1043, for which Ripple computes estimates in less than 4 h, on average.« less
4. Learning cycle-consistent cooperative networks via alternating MCMC teaching for unsupervised cross-domain translation

   Xie, J. ; Zheng, Z. ; Fang, X. ; Zhu, S. C. ; Wu, Y. N. ( January 2021 , Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   This paper studies the unsupervised cross-domain translation problem by proposing a generative framework, in which the probability distribution of each domain is represented by a generative cooperative network that consists of an energy based model and a latent variable model. The use of generative cooperative network enables maximum likelihood learning of the domain model by MCMC teaching, where the energy-based model seeks to fit the data distribution of domain and distills its knowledge to the latent variable model via MCMC. Specifically, in the MCMC teaching process, the latent variable model parameterized by an encoder-decoder maps examples from the source domainmore »to the target domain, while the energy-based model further refines the mapped results by Langevin revision such that the revised results match to the examples in the target domain in terms of the statistical properties, which are defined by the learned energy function. For the purpose of building up a correspondence between two unpaired domains, the proposed framework simultaneously learns a pair of cooperative networks with cycle consistency, accounting for a two-way translation between two domains, by alternating MCMC teaching. Experiments show that the proposed framework is useful for unsupervised image-to-image translation and unpaired image sequence translation.« less
5. Towards Interpretable Object Detection by Unfolding Latent Structures

   Wu, Tianfu ; Song, Xi ( October 2019 , IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision)

   This paper first proposes a method of formulating model interpretability in visual understanding tasks based on the idea of unfolding latent structures. It then presents a case study in object detection using popular two-stage region-based convolutional neural network (i.e., R-CNN) detection systems. The proposed method focuses on weakly-supervised extractive rationale generation, that is learning to unfold latent discriminative part configurations of object instances automatically and simultaneously in detection without using any supervision for part configurations. It utilizes a top-down hierarchical and compositional grammar model embedded in a directed acyclic AND-OR Graph (AOG) to explore and unfold the space of latentmore »part configurations of regions of interest (RoIs). It presents an AOGParsing operator that seamlessly integrates with the RoIPooling /RoIAlign operator widely used in R-CNN and is trained end-to-end. In object detection, a bounding box is interpreted by the best parse tree derived from the AOG on-the-fly, which is treated as the qualitatively extractive rationale generated for interpreting detection. In experiments, Faster R-CNN is used to test the proposed method on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and the COCO 2017 object detection datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed method can compute promising latent structures without hurting the performance.« less