通用机器学习 · online learning

Currently high-definition (HD) map construction leans towards a lightweight online generation tendency which aims to preserve timely and reliable road scene information. However map elements contain strong shape priors. Subtle and sparse annotations make current detection-based frameworks ambiguous in locating relevant feature scopes and cause the loss of detailed structures in prediction. To alleviate these problems we propose MGMap a mask-guided approach that effectively highlights the informative regions and achieves precise map element localization by introducing the learned masks. Specifically MGMap employs learned masks based on the enhanced multi-scale BEV features from two perspectives. At the instance level we propose the Mask-activated instance (MAI) decoder which incorporates global instance and structural information into instance queries by the activation of instance masks. At the point level a novel position-guided mask patch refinement (PG-MPR) module is designed to refine point locations from a finer-grained perspective enabling the extraction of point-specific patch information. Compared to the baselines our proposed MGMap achieves a notable improvement of around 10 mAP for different input modalities. Extensive experiments also demonstrate that our approach showcases strong robustness and generalization capabilities. Our code can be found at https://github.com/xiaolul2/MGMap.

Online continual learning suffers from an underfitted solution due to insufficient training for prompt model updates (e.g. single-epoch training). To address the challenge we propose an efficient online continual learning method using the neural collapse phenomenon. In particular we induce neural collapse to form a simplex equiangular tight frame (ETF) structure in the representation space so that the continuously learned model with a single epoch can better fit to the streamed data by proposing preparatory data training and residual correction in the representation space. With an extensive set of empirical validations using CIFAR-10/100 TinyImageNet ImageNet-200 and ImageNet-1K we show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a noticeable margin in various online continual learning scenarios such as disjoint and Gaussian scheduled continuous (i.e. boundary-free) data setups.

Online Continual Learning (CL) solves the problem of learning the ever-emerging new classification tasks from a continuous data stream. Unlike its offline counterpart in online CL the training data can only be seen once. Most existing online CL research regards catastrophic forgetting (i.e. model stability) as almost the only challenge. In this paper we argue that the model's capability to acquire new knowledge (i.e. model plasticity) is another challenge in online CL. While replay-based strategies have been shown to be effective in alleviating catastrophic forgetting there is a notable gap in research attention toward improving model plasticity. To this end we propose Collaborative Continual Learning (CCL) a collaborative learning based strategy to improve the model's capability in acquiring new concepts. Additionally we introduce Distillation Chain (DC) a collaborative learning scheme to boost the training of the models. We adapt CCL-DC to existing representative online CL works. Extensive experiments demonstrate that even if the learners are well-trained with state-of-the-art online CL methods our strategy can still improve model plasticity dramatically and thereby improve the overall performance by a large margin. The source code of our work is available at https://github.com/maorong-wang/CCL-DC.

Stereo rectification is widely considered "solved" due to the abundance of traditional approaches to perform rectification. However autonomous vehicles and robots in-the-wild require constant re-calibration due to exposure to various environmental factors including vibration and structural stress when cameras are arranged in a wide-baseline configuration. Conventional rectification methods fail in these challenging scenarios: especially for larger vehicles such as autonomous freight trucks and semi-trucks the resulting incorrect rectification severely affects the quality of downstream tasks that use stereo/multi-view data. To tackle these challenges we propose an online rectification approach that operates at real-time rates while achieving high accuracy. We propose a novel learning-based online calibration approach that utilizes stereo correlation volumes built from a feature representation obtained from cross-image attention. Our model is trained to minimize vertical optical flow as proxy rectification constraint and predicts the relative rotation between the stereo pair. The method is real-time and even outperforms conventional methods used for offline calibration and substantially improves downstream stereo depth post-rectification. We release two public datasets (https://light.princeton.edu/online-stereo-recification/) a synthetic and experimental wide baseline dataset to foster further research.

Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) has demonstrated remarkable success due to its low-cost and complementary sensors. However existing VIO methods lack the generalization ability to adjust to different environments and sensor attributes. In this paper we propose Adaptive VIO a new monocular visual-inertial odometry that combines online continual learning with traditional nonlinear optimization. Adaptive VIO comprises two networks to predict visual correspondence and IMU bias. Unlike end-to-end approaches that use networks to fuse the features from two modalities (camera and IMU) and predict poses directly we combine neural networks with visual-inertial bundle adjustment in our VIO system. The optimized estimates will be fed back to the visual and IMU bias networks refining the networks in a self-supervised manner. Such a learning-optimization-combined framework and feedback mechanism enable the system to perform online continual learning. Experiments demonstrate that our Adaptive VIO manifests adaptive capability on EuRoC and TUM-VI datasets. The overall performance exceeds the currently known learning-based VIO methods and is comparable to the state-of-the-art optimization-based methods.