Deep Neural Nets have hit quite a crest, But physical networks are where they must rest, And here we put them all to the test, To see which network optimization is best.
In many robotic applications, it is crucial to maintain a belief about the state of a system, which serves as input for planning and decision making and provides feedback during task execution. Bayesian Filtering algorithms address this state estimation problem, but they require models of process dynamics and sensory observations and the respective noise characteristics of these models. Recently, multiple works have demonstrated that these models can be learned by end-to-end training through differentiab
Energy-Based Models (EBMs), also known as non-normalized probabilistic models, specify probability density or mass functions up to an unknown normalizing constant. Unlike most other probabilistic models, EBMs do not place a restriction on the tractability of the normalizing constant, thus are more flexible to parameterize and can model a more expressive family of probability distributions. However, the unknown normalizing constant of EBMs makes training particularly difficult. Our goal is to provide a friendly introduction to modern approaches for EBM training. We start by explaining maximum likelihood training with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), and proceed to elaborate on MCMC-free approaches, including Score Matching (SM) and Noise Constrastive Estimation (NCE). We highlight theoretical connections among these three approaches, and end with a brief survey on alternative training methods, which are still under active research. Our tutorial is targeted at an audience with basic understanding of generative models who want to apply EBMs or start a research project in this direction.
Real-time semantic segmentation on high-resolution videos is challenging due to the strict requirements of speed. Recent approaches have utilized the inter-frame continuity to reduce redundant computation by warping the feature maps across adjacent frames, greatly speeding up the inference phase. However, their accuracy drops significantly owing to the imprecise motion estimation and error accumulation. In this paper, we propose to introduce a simple and effective correction stage right after the warping stage to form a framework named Tamed Warping Network (TWNet), aiming to improve the accuracy and robustness of warping-based models. The experimental results on the Cityscapes dataset show that with the correction, the accuracy (mIoU) significantly increases from 67.3% to 71.6%, and the speed edges down from 65.5 FPS to 61.8 FPS. For non-rigid categories such as human and object, the improvements of IoU are even higher than 18 percentage points.
Reading and writing research papers is one of the most privileged abilities that a qualified researcher should master. However, it is difficult for new researchers (eg{students}) to fully {grasp} this ability. It would be fascinating if we could train an intelligent agent to help people read and summarize papers, and perhaps even discover and exploit the potential knowledge clues to write novel papers. Although there have been existing works focusing on summarizing (emph{i.e.}, reading) the knowledge in a given text or generating (emph{i.e.}, writing) a text based on the given knowledge, the ability of simultaneously reading and writing is still under development. Typically, this requires an agent to fully understand the knowledge from the given text materials and generate correct and fluent novel paragraphs, which is very challenging in practice. In this paper, we propose a Deep ReAder-Writer (DRAW) network, which consists of a textit{Reader} that can extract knowledge graphs (KGs) from input paragraphs and discover potential knowledge, a graph-to-text textit{Writer} that generates a novel paragraph, and a textit{Reviewer} that reviews the generated paragraph from three different aspects. Extensive experiments show that our DRAW network outperforms considered baselines and several state-of-the-art methods on AGENDA and M-AGENDA datasets. Our code and supplementary are released at https://github.com/menggehe/DRAW.
This paper studies the resilient routing and (in-band) fast failover mechanisms supported in Software-Defined Networks (SDN). We analyze the potential benefits and limitations of such failover mechanisms, and focus on two main metrics: (1) correctness (in terms of connectivity and loop-freeness) and (2) load-balancing. We make the following contributions. First, we show that in the worst-case (i.e., under adversarial link failures), the usefulness of local failover is rather limited: already a small number of failures will violate connectivity properties under any fast failover policy, even though the underlying substrate network remains highly connected. We then present randomized and deterministic algorithms to compute resilient forwarding sets; these algorithms achieve an almost optimal tradeoff. Our worst-case analysis is complemented with a simulation study.