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Roads have well defined geometries, topologies, and traffic rules. While this has been widely exploited in motion planning methods to produce maneuvers that obey the law, little work has been devoted to utilize these priors in perception and motion forecasting methods. In this paper we propose to incorporate these structured priors as a loss function. In contrast to imposing hard constraints, this approach allows the model to handle non-compliant maneuvers when those happen in the real world. Safe motion planning is the end goal, and thus a probabilistic characterization of the possible future developments of the scene is key to choose the plan with the lowest expected cost. Towards this goal, we design a framework that leverages REINFORCE to incorporate non-differentiable priors over sample trajectories from a probabilistic model, thus optimizing the whole distribution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on real-world self-driving datasets containing complex road topologies and multi-agent interactions. Our motion forecasts not only exhibit better precision and map understanding, but most importantly result in safer motion plans taken by our self-driving vehicle. We emphasize that despite the importance of this evaluation, it has been often overlooked by previous perception and motion forecasting works.
Predicting multiple plausible future trajectories of the nearby vehicles is crucial for the safety of autonomous driving. Recent motion prediction approaches attempt to achieve such multimodal motion prediction by implicitly regularizing the feature or explicitly generating multiple candidate proposals. However, it remains challenging since the latent features may concentrate on the most frequent mode of the data while the proposal-based methods depend largely on the prior knowledge to generate and select the proposals. In this work, we propose a novel transformer framework for multimodal motion prediction, termed as mmTransformer. A novel network architecture based on stacked transformers is designed to model the multimodality at feature level with a set of fixed independent proposals. A region-based training strategy is then developed to induce the multimodality of the generated proposals. Experiments on Argoverse dataset show that the proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on motion prediction, substantially improving the diversity and the accuracy of the predicted trajectories. Demo video and code are available at https://decisionforce.github.io/mmTransformer.
The popularity of multimodal sensors and the accessibility of the Internet have brought us a massive amount of unlabeled multimodal data. Since existing datasets and well-trained models are primarily unimodal, the modality gap between a unimodal network and unlabeled multimodal data poses an interesting problem: how to transfer a pre-trained unimodal network to perform the same task on unlabeled multimodal data? In this work, we propose multimodal knowledge expansion (MKE), a knowledge distillation-based framework to effectively utilize multimodal data without requiring labels. Opposite to traditional knowledge distillation, where the student is designed to be lightweight and inferior to the teacher, we observe that a multimodal student model consistently denoises pseudo labels and generalizes better than its teacher. Extensive experiments on four tasks and different modalities verify this finding. Furthermore, we connect the mechanism of MKE to semi-supervised learning and offer both empirical and theoretical explanations to understand the denoising capability of a multimodal student.
Identifying persuasive speakers in an adversarial environment is a critical task. In a national election, politicians would like to have persuasive speakers campaign on their behalf. When a company faces adverse publicity, they would like to engage persuasive advocates for their position in the presence of adversaries who are critical of them. Debates represent a common platform for these forms of adversarial persuasion. This paper solves two problems: the Debate Outcome Prediction (DOP) problem predicts who wins a debate while the Intensity of Persuasion Prediction (IPP) problem predicts the change in the number of votes before and after a speaker speaks. Though DOP has been previously studied, we are the first to study IPP. Past studies on DOP fail to leverage two important aspects of multimodal data: 1) multiple modalities are often semantically aligned, and 2) different modalities may provide diverse information for prediction. Our M2P2 (Multimodal Persuasion Prediction) framework is the first to use multimodal (acoustic, visual, language) data to solve the IPP problem. To leverage the alignment of different modalities while maintaining the diversity of the cues they provide, M2P2 devises a novel adaptive fusion learning framework which fuses embeddings obtained from two modules -- an alignment module that extracts shared information between modalities and a heterogeneity module that learns the weights of different modalities with guidance from three separately trained unimodal reference models. We test M2P2 on the popular IQ2US dataset designed for DOP. We also introduce a new dataset called QPS (from Qipashuo, a popular Chinese debate TV show ) for IPP. M2P2 significantly outperforms 3 recent baselines on both datasets. Our code and QPS dataset can be found at http://snap.stanford.edu/m2p2/.
We revisit the importance of the individual units in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for visual recognition. By conducting unit ablation experiments on CNNs trained on large scale image datasets, we demonstrate that, though ablating any individual unit does not hurt overall classification accuracy, it does lead to significant damage on the accuracy of specific classes. This result shows that an individual unit is specialized to encode information relevant to a subset of classes. We compute the correlation between the accuracy drop under unit ablation and various attributes of an individual unit such as class selectivity and weight L1 norm. We confirm that unit attributes such as class selectivity are a poor predictor for impact on overall accuracy as found previously in recent work cite{morcos2018importance}. However, our results show that class selectivity along with other attributes are good predictors of the importance of one unit to individual classes. We evaluate the impact of random rotation, batch normalization, and dropout to the importance of units to specific classes. Our results show that units with high selectivity play an important role in network classification power at the individual class level. Understanding and interpreting the behavior of these units is necessary and meaningful.
Visual relationship detection aims to reason over relationships among salient objects in images, which has drawn increasing attention over the past few years. Inspired by human reasoning mechanisms, it is believed that external visual commonsense knowledge is beneficial for reasoning visual relationships of objects in images, which is however rarely considered in existing methods. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named Relational Visual-Linguistic Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (RVL-BERT), which performs relational reasoning with both visual and language commonsense knowledge learned via self-supervised pre-training with multimodal representations. RVL-BERT also uses an effective spatial module and a novel mask attention module to explicitly capture spatial information among the objects. Moreover, our model decouples object detection from visual relationship recognition by taking in object names directly, enabling it to be used on top of any object detection system. We show through quantitative and qualitative experiments that, with the transferred knowledge and novel modules, RVL-BERT achieves competitive results on two challenging visual relationship detection datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/coldmanck/RVL-BERT.