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Most existing visual-inertial odometry (VIO) initialization methods rely on accurate pre-calibrated extrinsic parameters. However, during long-term use, irreversible structural deformation caused by temperature changes, mechanical squeezing, etc. will cause changes in extrinsic parameters, especially in the rotational part. Existing initialization methods that simultaneously estimate extrinsic parameters suffer from poor robustness, low precision, and long initialization latency due to the need for sufficient translational motion. To address these problems, we propose a novel VIO initialization method, which jointly considers extrinsic orientation and gyroscope bias within the normal epipolar constraints, achieving higher precision and better robustness without delayed rotational calibration. First, a rotation-only constraint is designed for extrinsic orientation and gyroscope bias estimation, which tightly couples gyroscope measurements and visual observations and can be solved in pure-rotation cases. Second, we propose a weighting strategy together with a failure detection strategy to enhance the precision and robustness of the estimator. Finally, we leverage Maximum A Posteriori to refine the results before enough translation parallax comes. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and robustness while maintaining competitive efficiency.

3D point cloud segmentation has a wide range of applications in areas such as autonomous driving, augmented reality, virtual reality and digital twins. The point cloud data collected in real scenes often contain small objects and categories with small sample sizes, which are difficult to handle by existing networks. In this regard, we propose a point cloud segmentation network that fuses local attention based on density perception with global attention. The core idea is to increase the effective receptive field of each point while reducing the loss of information about small objects in dense areas. Specifically, we divide different sized windows for local areas with different densities to compute attention within the window. Furthermore, we consider each local area as an independent token for the global attention of the entire input. A category-response loss is also proposed to balance the processing of different categories and sizes of objects. In particular, we set up an additional fully connected layer in the middle of the network for prediction of the presence of object categories, and construct a binary cross-entropy loss to respond to the presence of categories in the scene. In experiments, our method achieves competitive results in semantic segmentation and part segmentation tasks on several publicly available datasets. Experiments on point cloud data obtained from complex real-world scenes filled with tiny objects also validate the strong segmentation capability of our method for small objects as well as small sample categories.

Conversational search supports multi-turn user-system interactions to solve complex information needs. Different from the traditional single-turn ad-hoc search, conversational search encounters a more challenging problem of context-dependent query understanding with the lengthy and long-tail conversational history context. While conversational query rewriting methods leverage explicit rewritten queries to train a rewriting model to transform the context-dependent query into a stand-stone search query, this is usually done without considering the quality of search results. Conversational dense retrieval methods use fine-tuning to improve a pre-trained ad-hoc query encoder, but they are limited by the conversational search data available for training. In this paper, we leverage both rewritten queries and relevance judgments in the conversational search data to train a better query representation model. The key idea is to align the query representation with those of rewritten queries and relevant documents. The proposed model -- Query Representation Alignment Conversational Dense Retriever, QRACDR, is tested on eight datasets, including various settings in conversational search and ad-hoc search. The results demonstrate the strong performance of QRACDR compared with state-of-the-art methods, and confirm the effectiveness of representation alignment., Comment: Accepted by CIKM 2024

Generally, high-level features provide more geometrical information compared to point features, which can be exploited to further constrain motions. Planes are commonplace in man-made environments, offering an active means to reduce drift, due to their extensive spatial and temporal observability. To make full use of planar information, we propose a novel visual-inertial odometry (VIO) using an RGBD camera and an inertial measurement unit (IMU), effectively integrating point and plane features in an extended Kalman filter (EKF) framework. Depth information of point features is leveraged to improve the accuracy of point triangulation, while plane features serve as direct observations added into the state vector. Notably, to benefit long-term navigation,a novel graph-based drift detection strategy is proposed to search overlapping and identical structures in the plane map so that the cumulative drift is suppressed subsequently. The experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that our system outperforms state-of-the-art methods in localization accuracy and meanwhile generates a compact and consistent plane map, free of expensive global bundle adjustment and loop closing techniques.

The performance of domain adaptation technologies has not yet reached an ideal level in the current 3D object detection field for autonomous driving, which is mainly due to significant differences in the size of vehicles, as well as the environments they operate in when applied across domains. These factors together hinder the effective transfer and application of knowledge learned from specific datasets. Since the existing evaluation metrics are initially designed for evaluation on a single domain by calculating the 2D or 3D overlap between the prediction and ground-truth bounding boxes, they often suffer from the overfitting problem caused by the size differences among datasets. This raises a fundamental question related to the evaluation of the 3D object detection models' cross-domain performance: Do we really need models to maintain excellent performance in their original 3D bounding boxes after being applied across domains? From a practical application perspective, one of our main focuses is actually on preventing collisions between vehicles and other obstacles, especially in cross-domain scenarios where correctly predicting the size of vehicles is much more difficult. In other words, as long as a model can accurately identify the closest surfaces to the ego vehicle, it is sufficient to effectively avoid obstacles. In this paper, we propose two metrics to measure 3D object detection models' ability of detecting the closer surfaces to the sensor on the ego vehicle, which can be used to evaluate their cross-domain performance more comprehensively and reasonably. Furthermore, we propose a refinement head, named EdgeHead, to guide models to focus more on the learnable closer surfaces, which can greatly improve the cross-domain performance of existing models not only under our new metrics, but even also under the original BEV/3D metrics., Comment: Accepted by the 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2024)

Graph-based models and contrastive learning have emerged as prominent methods in Collaborative Filtering (CF). While many existing models in CF incorporate these methods in their design, there seems to be a limited depth of analysis regarding the foundational principles behind them. This paper bridges graph convolution, a pivotal element of graph-based models, with contrastive learning through a theoretical framework. By examining the learning dynamics and equilibrium of the contrastive loss, we offer a fresh lens to understand contrastive learning via graph theory, emphasizing its capability to capture high-order connectivity. Building on this analysis, we further show that the graph convolutional layers often used in graph-based models are not essential for high-order connectivity modeling and might contribute to the risk of oversmoothing. Stemming from our findings, we introduce Simple Contrastive Collaborative Filtering (SCCF), a simple and effective algorithm based on a naive embedding model and a modified contrastive loss. The efficacy of the algorithm is demonstrated through extensive experiments across four public datasets. The experiment code is available at \url{https://github.com/wu1hong/SCCF}. \end{abstract}, Comment: KDD 2024

Consider the problem of predicting the next symbol given a sample path of length n, whose joint distribution belongs to a distribution class that may have long-term memory. The goal is to compete with the conditional predictor that knows the true model. For both hidden Markov models (HMMs) and renewal processes, we determine the optimal prediction risk in Kullback- Leibler divergence up to universal constant factors. Extending existing results in finite-order Markov models [HJW23] and drawing ideas from universal compression, the proposed estimator has a prediction risk bounded by redundancy of the distribution class and a memory term that accounts for the long-range dependency of the model. Notably, for HMMs with bounded state and observation spaces, a polynomial-time estimator based on dynamic programming is shown to achieve the optimal prediction risk {\Theta}(log n/n); prior to this work, the only known result of this type is O(1/log n) obtained using Markov approximation [Sha+18]. Matching minimax lower bounds are obtained by making connections to redundancy and mutual information via a reduction argument., Comment: 37 Pages

We consider the problem of approximating a general Gaussian location mixture by finite mixtures. The minimum order of finite mixtures that achieve a prescribed accuracy (measured by various $f$-divergences) is determined within constant factors for the family of mixing distributions with compactly support or appropriate assumptions on the tail probability including subgaussian and subexponential. While the upper bound is achieved using the technique of local moment matching, the lower bound is established by relating the best approximation error to the low-rank approximation of certain trigonometric moment matrices, followed by a refined spectral analysis of their minimum eigenvalue. In the case of Gaussian mixing distributions, this result corrects a previous lower bound in [Allerton Conference 48 (2010) 620-628].

Line features are valid complements for point features in man-made environments. 3D-2D constraints provided by line features have been widely used in Visual Odometry (VO) and Structure-from-Motion (SfM) systems. However, how to accurately solve three-view relative motion only with 2D observations of points and lines in real time has not been fully explored. In this paper, we propose a novel three-view pose solver based on rotation-translation decoupled estimation. First, a high-precision rotation estimation method based on normal vector coplanarity constraints that consider the uncertainty of observations is proposed, which can be solved by Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm efficiently. Second, a robust linear translation constraint that minimizes the degree of the rotation components and feature observation components in equations is elaborately designed for estimating translations accurately. Experiments on synthetic data and real-world data show that the proposed approach improves both rotation and translation accuracy compared to the classical trifocal-tensor-based method and the state-of-the-art two-view algorithm in outdoor and indoor environments.

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is crucial in computer vision, aiming to retrieve database images similar to a query image from an extensive collection of known images. However, like many vision tasks, VPR always degrades at night due to the scarcity of nighttime images. Moreover, VPR needs to address the cross-domain problem of night-to-day rather than just the issue of a single nighttime domain. In response to these issues, we present NocPlace, which leverages generative and inherited knowledge transfer to embed resilience against dazzling lights and extreme darkness in the global descriptor. First, we establish a day-night urban scene dataset called NightCities, capturing diverse lighting variations and dark scenarios across 60 cities globally. Then, an image generation network is trained on this dataset and processes a large-scale VPR dataset, obtaining its nighttime version. Finally, VPR models are fine-tuned using descriptors inherited from themselves and night-style images, which builds explicit cross-domain contrastive relationships. Comprehensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate our contributions and the superiority of NocPlace. Without adding any real-time computing resources, NocPlace improves the performance of Eigenplaces by 7.6% on Tokyo 24/7 Night and 16.8% on SVOX Night., Comment: 28 pages,9 figures

The immense popularity of racket sports has fueled substantial demand in tactical analysis with broadcast videos. However, existing manual methods require laborious annotation, and recent attempts leveraging video perception models are limited to low-level annotations like ball trajectories, overlooking tactics that necessitate an understanding of stroke techniques. State-of-the-art action segmentation models also struggle with technique recognition due to frequent occlusions and motion-induced blurring in racket sports videos. To address these challenges, We propose ViSTec, a Video-based Sports Technique recognition model inspired by human cognition that synergizes sparse visual data with rich contextual insights. Our approach integrates a graph to explicitly model strategic knowledge in stroke sequences and enhance technique recognition with contextual inductive bias. A two-stage action perception model is jointly trained to align with the contextual knowledge in the graph. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing models by a significant margin. Case studies with experts from the Chinese national table tennis team validate our model's capacity to automate analysis for technical actions and tactical strategies. More details are available at: https://ViSTec2024.github.io/., Comment: accepted by AAAI-24 Main Track

This paper studies the problem of shuffled linear regression, where the correspondence between predictors and responses in a linear model is obfuscated by a latent permutation. Specifically, we consider the model $y = \Pi_* X \beta_* + w$, where $X$ is an $n \times d$ standard Gaussian design matrix, $w$ is Gaussian noise with entrywise variance $\sigma^2$, $\Pi_*$ is an unknown $n \times n$ permutation matrix, and $\beta_*$ is the regression coefficient, also unknown. Previous work has shown that, in the large $n$-limit, the minimal signal-to-noise ratio ($\mathsf{SNR}$), $\lVert \beta_* \rVert^2/\sigma^2$, for recovering the unknown permutation exactly with high probability is between $n^2$ and $n^C$ for some absolute constant $C$ and the sharp threshold is unknown even for $d=1$. We show that this threshold is precisely $\mathsf{SNR} = n^4$ for exact recovery throughout the sublinear regime $d=o(n)$. As a by-product of our analysis, we also determine the sharp threshold of almost exact recovery to be $\mathsf{SNR} = n^2$, where all but a vanishing fraction of the permutation is reconstructed., Comment: 18 pages (9 main, 1 references, 8 appendix)

We study the problem of estimating the score function of an unknown probability distribution $\rho^*$ from $n$ independent and identically distributed observations in $d$ dimensions. Assuming that $\rho^*$ is subgaussian and has a Lipschitz-continuous score function $s^*$, we establish the optimal rate of $\tilde \Theta(n^{-\frac{2}{d+4}})$ for this estimation problem under the loss function $\|\hat s - s^*\|^2_{L^2(\rho^*)}$ that is commonly used in the score matching literature, highlighting the curse of dimensionality where sample complexity for accurate score estimation grows exponentially with the dimension $d$. Leveraging key insights in empirical Bayes theory as well as a new convergence rate of smoothed empirical distribution in Hellinger distance, we show that a regularized score estimator based on a Gaussian kernel attains this rate, shown optimal by a matching minimax lower bound. We also discuss extensions to estimating $\beta$-H\"older continuous scores with $\beta \leq 1$, as well as the implication of our theory on the sample complexity of score-based generative models., Comment: COLT 2024; added the new results on extending to beta-Holder scores with beta <= 1

Magnetic position sensors find extensive applications in various industrial sectors and consumer products. However, measuring angles in the full range of 0{\deg} to 360{\deg} in a wide field range using a single magnetic sensor remains a challenge. Here, we propose a magnetic position sensor based on a single Wheatstone bridge structure made from a single ferromagnetic layer. By measuring the anisotropic magnetoresistance (AMR) signal from the bridge and two sets of anomalous Nernst effect (ANE) signals from the transverse ports on two perpendicular Wheatstone bridge arms concurrently, we show that it is possible to achieve 0{\deg} to 360{\deg} angle detection using a single bridge sensor. The combined use of AMR and ANE signals allows to achieve a mean angle error in the range of 0.51{\deg} to 1.05{\deg} within a field range of 100 Oe to 10,000 Oe., Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures

Large Language Models (LLMs) are foundational in language technologies, particularly in information retrieval (IR). Previous studies have utilized LLMs for query expansion, achieving notable improvements in IR. In this paper, we thoroughly explore the best practice of leveraging LLMs for query expansion. To this end, we introduce a training-free, straightforward yet effective framework called Multi-Text Generation Integration (\textsc{MuGI}). It leverages LLMs to generate multiple pseudo-references, integrating them with queries to enhance both sparse and dense retrievers. Our empirical findings reveal that: (1) Increasing the number of samples from LLMs benefits IR systems; (2) A balance between the query and pseudo-documents, and an effective integration strategy, is critical for high performance; (3) Contextual information from LLMs is essential, even boost a 23M model to outperform a 7B baseline model; (4) Pseudo relevance feedback can further calibrate queries for improved performance; and (5) Query expansion is widely applicable and versatile, consistently enhancing models ranging from 23M to 7B parameters. Our code and all generated references are made available at \url{https://github.com/lezhang7/Retrieval_MuGI}

Empirical Bayes provides a powerful approach to learning and adapting to latent structure in data. Theory and algorithms for empirical Bayes have a rich literature for sequence models, but are less understood in settings where latent variables and data interact through more complex designs. In this work, we study empirical Bayes estimation of an i.i.d. prior in Bayesian linear models, via the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE). We introduce and study a system of gradient flow equations for optimizing the marginal log-likelihood, jointly over the prior and posterior measures in its Gibbs variational representation using a smoothed reparametrization of the regression coefficients. A diffusion-based implementation yields a Langevin dynamics MCEM algorithm, where the prior law evolves continuously over time to optimize a sequence-model log-likelihood defined by the coordinates of the current Langevin iterate. We show consistency of the NPMLE as $n, p \rightarrow \infty$ under mild conditions, including settings of random sub-Gaussian designs when $n \asymp p$. In high noise, we prove a uniform log-Sobolev inequality for the mixing of Langevin dynamics, for possibly misspecified priors and non-log-concave posteriors. We then establish polynomial-time convergence of the joint gradient flow to a near-NPMLE if the marginal negative log-likelihood is convex in a sub-level set of the initialization.

Depth estimation from a single image is a challenging problem in computer vision because binocular disparity or motion information is absent. Whereas impressive performances have been reported in this area recently using end-to-end trained deep neural architectures, as to what cues in the images that are being exploited by these black box systems is hard to know. To this end, in this work, we quantify the relative contributions of the known cues of depth in a monocular depth estimation setting using an indoor scene data set. Our work uses feature extraction techniques to relate the single features of shape, texture, colour and saturation, taken in isolation, to predict depth. We find that the shape of objects extracted by edge detection substantially contributes more than others in the indoor setting considered, while the other features also have contributions in varying degrees. These insights will help optimise depth estimation models, boosting their accuracy and robustness. They promise to broaden the practical applications of vision-based depth estimation. The project code is attached to the supplementary material and will be published on GitHub.

Modern recommender systems employ various sequential modules such as self-attention to learn dynamic user interests. However, these methods are less effective in capturing collaborative and transitional signals within user interaction sequences. First, the self-attention architecture uses the embedding of a single item as the attention query, making it challenging to capture collaborative signals. Second, these methods typically follow an auto-regressive framework, which is unable to learn global item transition patterns. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new method called Multi-Query Self-Attention with Transition-Aware Embedding Distillation (MQSA-TED). First, we propose an $L$-query self-attention module that employs flexible window sizes for attention queries to capture collaborative signals. In addition, we introduce a multi-query self-attention method that balances the bias-variance trade-off in modeling user preferences by combining long and short-query self-attentions. Second, we develop a transition-aware embedding distillation module that distills global item-to-item transition patterns into item embeddings, which enables the model to memorize and leverage transitional signals and serves as a calibrator for collaborative signals. Experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modules., Comment: WSDM 2024 Oral Presentation

Multi-modal open-domain question answering typically requires evidence retrieval from databases across diverse modalities, such as images, tables, passages, etc. Even Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 fall short in this task. To enable LLMs to tackle the task in a zero-shot manner, we introduce MoqaGPT, a straightforward and flexible framework. Using a divide-and-conquer strategy that bypasses intricate multi-modality ranking, our framework can accommodate new modalities and seamlessly transition to new models for the task. Built upon LLMs, MoqaGPT retrieves and extracts answers from each modality separately, then fuses this multi-modal information using LLMs to produce a final answer. Our methodology boosts performance on the MMCoQA dataset, improving F1 by +37.91 points and EM by +34.07 points over the supervised baseline. On the MultiModalQA dataset, MoqaGPT surpasses the zero-shot baseline, improving F1 by 9.5 points and EM by 10.1 points, and significantly closes the gap with supervised methods. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/lezhang7/MOQAGPT., Comment: Accepted into EMNLP2023 Findings

Recently orbital Hall current has attracted attention as an alternative method to switch the magnetization of ferromagnets. Here we present our findings on electrical switching of antiferromagnetic state in Mn3Sn/Cr, where despite the much smaller spin Hall angle of Cr, the switching current density is comparable to heavy metal based heterostructures. On the other hand, the inverse process, i.e., spin-to-charge conversion in Cr-based heterostructures is much less efficient than the Pt-based equivalents, as manifested in the almost one order of magnitude smaller terahertz emission intensity and spin current induced magnetoresistance in Cr-based structures. These results in combination with the slow decay of terahertz emission against Cr thickness (diffusion length of ~11 nm) suggest that the observed magnetic switching can be attributed to orbital current generation in Cr, followed by efficient conversion to spin current. Our work demonstrates the potential of light metals like Cr as an efficient orbital/spin current source for antiferromagnetic spintronics., Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures

Achieving accurate material segmentation for 3-channel RGB images is challenging due to the considerable variation in a material's appearance. Hyperspectral images, which are sets of spectral measurements sampled at multiple wavelengths, theoretically offer distinct information for material identification, as variations in intensity of electromagnetic radiation reflected by a surface depend on the material composition of a scene. However, existing hyperspectral datasets are impoverished regarding the number of images and material categories for the dense material segmentation task, and collecting and annotating hyperspectral images with a spectral camera is prohibitively expensive. To address this, we propose a new model, the MatSpectNet to segment materials with recovered hyperspectral images from RGB images. The network leverages the principles of colour perception in modern cameras to constrain the reconstructed hyperspectral images and employs the domain adaptation method to generalise the hyperspectral reconstruction capability from a spectral recovery dataset to material segmentation datasets. The reconstructed hyperspectral images are further filtered using learned response curves and enhanced with human perception. The performance of MatSpectNet is evaluated on the LMD dataset as well as the OpenSurfaces dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that MatSpectNet attains a 1.60% increase in average pixel accuracy and a 3.42% improvement in mean class accuracy compared with the most recent publication. The project code is attached to the supplementary material and will be published on GitHub., Comment: 7 pages main paper

We consider the problem of empirical Bayes estimation for (multivariate) Poisson means. Existing solutions that have been shown theoretically optimal for minimizing the regret (excess risk over the Bayesian oracle that knows the prior) have several shortcomings. For example, the classical Robbins estimator does not retain the monotonicity property of the Bayes estimator and performs poorly under moderate sample size. Estimators based on the minimum distance and non-parametric maximum likelihood (NPMLE) methods correct these issues, but are computationally expensive with complexity growing exponentially with dimension. Extending the approach of Barbehenn and Zhao (2022), in this work we construct monotone estimators based on empirical risk minimization (ERM) that retain similar theoretical guarantees and can be computed much more efficiently. Adapting the idea of offset Rademacher complexity Liang et al. (2015) to the non-standard loss and function class in empirical Bayes, we show that the shape-constrained ERM estimator attains the minimax regret within constant factors in one dimension and within logarithmic factors in multiple dimensions., Comment: 34 pages, 1 Figure, to appear in the 2023 Conference of Learning Theory (COLT)

We consider the question of estimating multi-dimensional Gaussian mixtures (GM) with compactly supported or subgaussian mixing distributions. Minimax estimation rate for this class (under Hellinger, TV and KL divergences) is a long-standing open question, even in one dimension. In this paper we characterize this rate (for all constant dimensions) in terms of the metric entropy of the class. Such characterizations originate from seminal works of Le Cam (1973); Birge (1983); Haussler and Opper (1997); Yang and Barron (1999). However, for GMs a key ingredient missing from earlier work (and widely sought-after) is a comparison result showing that the KL and the squared Hellinger distance are within a constant multiple of each other uniformly over the class. Our main technical contribution is in showing this fact, from which we derive entropy characterization for estimation rate under Hellinger and KL. Interestingly, the sequential (online learning) estimation rate is characterized by the global entropy, while the single-step (batch) rate corresponds to local entropy, paralleling a similar result for the Gaussian sequence model recently discovered by Neykov (2022) and Mourtada (2023). Additionally, since Hellinger is a proper metric, our comparison shows that GMs under KL satisfy the triangle inequality within multiplicative constants, implying that proper and improper estimation rates coincide.

In conversational search, the user's real search intent for the current turn is dependent on the previous conversation history. It is challenging to determine a good search query from the whole conversation context. To avoid the expensive re-training of the query encoder, most existing methods try to learn a rewriting model to de-contextualize the current query by mimicking the manual query rewriting. However, manually rewritten queries are not always the best search queries. Training a rewriting model on them would limit the model's ability to produce good search queries. Another useful hint is the potential answer to the question. In this paper, we propose ConvGQR, a new framework to reformulate conversational queries based on generative pre-trained language models (PLMs), one for query rewriting and another for generating potential answers. By combining both, ConvGQR can produce better search queries. In addition, to relate query reformulation to retrieval performance, we propose a knowledge infusion mechanism to optimize both query reformulation and retrieval. Extensive experiments on four conversational search datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of ConvGQR., Comment: Published at ACL 2023

A plethora of wearable devices have been developed or commercialized for continuous non-invasive monitoring of physiological signals that are crucial for preventive care and management of chronic conditions. However, most of these devices are either sensitive to skin conditions or its interface with the skin due to the requirement that the external stimuli such as light or electrical excitation must penetrate the skin to detect the pulse. This often results in large motion artefacts and unsuitability for certain skin conditions. Here, we demonstrate a simple fingertip-type device which can detect clear pulse signals under all conditions, including fingers covered by opaque substances such as a plaster or nail polish, or fingers immersed in liquid. The device has a very simple structure, consisting of only a pair of magnets and a magnetic sensor. We show through both experiments and simulations that the detected pulsation signals correspond directly to the magnet vibrations caused by blood circulation, and therefore, in addition to heartrate detection, the proposed device can also be potentially used for blood pressure measurement.

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is the task of retrieving database images similar to a query photo by comparing it to a large database of known images. In real-world applications, extreme illumination changes caused by query images taken at night pose a significant obstacle that VPR needs to overcome. However, a training set with day-night correspondence for city-scale, street-level VPR does not exist. To address this challenge, we propose a novel pipeline that divides VPR and conquers Nocturnal Place Recognition (NPR). Specifically, we first established a street-level day-night dataset, NightStreet, and used it to train an unpaired image-to-image translation model. Then we used this model to process existing large-scale VPR datasets to generate the VPR-Night datasets and demonstrated how to combine them with two popular VPR pipelines. Finally, we proposed a divide-and-conquer VPR framework and provided explanations at the theoretical, experimental, and application levels. Under our framework, previous methods can significantly improve performance on two public datasets, including the top-ranked method., Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures

The false discovery rate (FDR) and the false non-discovery rate (FNR), defined as the expected false discovery proportion (FDP) and the false non-discovery proportion (FNP), are the most popular benchmarks for multiple testing. Despite the theoretical and algorithmic advances in recent years, the optimal tradeoff between the FDR and the FNR has been largely unknown except for certain restricted classes of decision rules, e.g., separable rules, or for other performance metrics, e.g., the marginal FDR and the marginal FNR (mFDR and mFNR). In this paper, we determine the asymptotically optimal FDR-FNR tradeoff under the two-group random mixture model when the number of hypotheses tends to infinity. Distinct from the optimal mFDR-mFNR tradeoff, which is achieved by separable decision rules, the optimal FDR-FNR tradeoff requires compound rules even in the large-sample limit and for models as simple as the Gaussian location model. This suboptimality of separable rules also holds for other objectives, such as maximizing the expected number of true discoveries. Finally, to address the limitation of the FDR which only controls the expectation but not the fluctuation of the FDP, we also determine the optimal tradeoff when the FDP is controlled with high probability and show it coincides with that of the mFDR and the mFNR. Extensions to models with a fixed non-null proportion are also obtained., Comment: New results on maximizing the number of true discoveries and extensions to models with fixed non-null proportion

We study estimation in the linear model $y=A\beta^\star+\epsilon$, in a Bayesian setting where $\beta^\star$ has an entrywise i.i.d. prior and the design $A$ is rotationally-invariant in law. In the large system limit as dimension and sample size increase proportionally, a set of related conjectures have been postulated for the asymptotic mutual information, Bayes-optimal mean squared error, and TAP mean-field equations that characterize the Bayes posterior mean of $\beta^\star$. In this work, we prove these conjectures for a general class of signal priors and for arbitrary rotationally-invariant designs $A$, under a "high-temperature" condition that restricts the range of eigenvalues of $A^\top A$. Our proof uses a conditional second-moment method argument, where we condition on the iterates of a version of the Vector AMP algorithm for solving the TAP mean-field equations.

Empirical Bayes (EB) is a popular framework for large-scale inference that aims to find data-driven estimators to compete with the Bayesian oracle that knows the true prior. Two principled approaches to EB estimation have emerged over the years: $f$-modeling, which constructs an approximate Bayes rule by estimating the marginal distribution of the data, and $g$-modeling, which estimates the prior from data and then applies the learned Bayes rule. For the Poisson model, the prototypical examples are the celebrated Robbins estimator and the nonparametric MLE (NPMLE), respectively. It has long been recognized in practice that the Robbins estimator, while being conceptually appealing and computationally simple, lacks robustness and can be easily derailed by ``outliers'', unlike the NPMLE which provides more stable and interpretable fit thanks to its Bayes form. On the other hand, not only do the existing theories shed little light on this phenomenon, but they all point to the opposite, as both methods have recently been shown optimal in terms of regret (excess over the Bayes risk) for compactly supported and subexponential priors. In this paper we provide a theoretical justification for the superiority of $g$-modeling over $f$-modeling for heavy-tailed data by considering priors with bounded $p>1$th moment. We show that with mild regularization, any $g$-modeling method that is Hellinger rate-optimal in density estimation achieves an optimal total regret $\tilde \Theta(n^{\frac{3}{2p+1}})$; in particular, the special case of NPMLE succeeds without regularization. In contrast, there exists an $f$-modeling estimator whose density estimation rate is optimal but whose EB regret is suboptimal by a polynomial factor. These results show that the proper Bayes form provides a ``general recipe of success'' for optimal EB estimation that applies to all $g$-modeling (but not $f$-modeling) methods., Comment: New results including general positive results on g-modeling and negative results on f-modeling; optimality of unregularized NPMLE; extension to compound setting

We propose an efficient algorithm for graph matching based on similarity scores constructed from counting a certain family of weighted trees rooted at each vertex. For two Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi graphs $\mathcal{G}(n,q)$ whose edges are correlated through a latent vertex correspondence, we show that this algorithm correctly matches all but a vanishing fraction of the vertices with high probability, provided that $nq\to\infty$ and the edge correlation coefficient $\rho$ satisfies $\rho^2>\alpha \approx 0.338$, where $\alpha$ is Otter's tree-counting constant. Moreover, this almost exact matching can be made exact under an extra condition that is information-theoretically necessary. This is the first polynomial-time graph matching algorithm that succeeds at an explicit constant correlation and applies to both sparse and dense graphs. In comparison, previous methods either require $\rho=1-o(1)$ or are restricted to sparse graphs. The crux of the algorithm is a carefully curated family of rooted trees called chandeliers, which allows effective extraction of the graph correlation from the counts of the same tree while suppressing the undesirable correlation between those of different trees.

Electrical manipulation of spins is essential to design state-of-the-art spintronic devices and commonly relies on the spin current injected from a second heavy-metal material. The fact that chiral antiferromagnets produce spin current inspires us to explore the magnetization switching of chiral spins using self-generated spin torque. Here, we demonstrate the electric switching of noncollinear antiferromagnetic state in Mn3Sn by observing a crossover from conventional spin-orbit torque to the self-generated spin torque when increasing the MgO thickness in Ta/MgO/Mn3Sn polycrystalline films. The spin current injection from the Ta layer can be controlled and even blocked by varying the MgO thickness, but the switching sustains even at a large MgO thickness. Furthermore, the switching polarity reverses when the MgO thickness exceeds around 3 nm, which cannot be explained by the spin-orbit torque scenario due to spin current injection from the Ta layer. Evident current-induced switching is also observed in MgO/Mn3Sn and Ti/Mn3Sn bilayers, where external injection of spin Hall current to Mn3Sn is negligible. The inter-grain spin-transfer torque induced by spin-polarized current explains the experimental observations. Our findings provide an alternative pathway for electrical manipulation of non-collinear antiferromagnetic state without resorting to the conventional bilayer structure., Comment: 29 pages, 6 figures

The Robbins estimator is the most iconic and widely used procedure in the empirical Bayes literature for the Poisson model. On one hand, this method has been recently shown to be minimax optimal in terms of the regret (excess risk over the Bayesian oracle that knows the true prior) for various nonparametric classes of priors. On the other hand, it has been long recognized in practice that Robbins estimator lacks the desired smoothness and monotonicity of Bayes estimators and can be easily derailed by those data points that were rarely observed before. Based on the minimum-distance distance method, we propose a suite of empirical Bayes estimators, including the classical nonparametric maximum likelihood, that outperform the Robbins method in a variety of synthetic and real data sets and retain its optimality in terms of minimax regret., Comment: 28 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables. Added an extension to a multivariate setup and a comparison with the worst case prior

In many applications, the ability to measure the vector information of a magnetic field with high spatial resolution and low cost is essential, but it is still a challenge for existing magnetometers composed of multiple sensors. Here, we report a single-device based vector magnetometer, which is enabled by spin-orbit torque, capable of measuring a vector magnetic field using the harmonic Hall resistances of a superparamagnetic ferromagnet (FM)/heavy metal (HM) bilayer. Under an ac driving current, the first and second harmonic Hall resistances of the FM/HM bilayer show a linear relationship with the vertical and longitudinal component (along the current direction) of the magnetic field, respectively. By employing a L-shaped Hall device with two orthogonal arms, we can measure all the three field components simultaneously, so as to detect both the amplitude and direction of magnetic field in a three-dimensional space. As proof of concepts, we demonstrate both angular position sensing on the three coordinate planes and vector mapping of magnetic field generated by a permanent magnet, both of which are in good agreement with the simulation results. Crosstalk between vertical and longitudinal field components at large field is discussed using theoretical models., Comment: 24 pages, 8 figures

This paper studies the problem of matching two complete graphs with edge weights correlated through latent geometries, extending a recent line of research on random graph matching with independent edge weights to geometric models. Specifically, given a random permutation $\pi^*$ on $[n]$ and $n$ iid pairs of correlated Gaussian vectors $\{X_{\pi^*(i)}, Y_i\}$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$ with noise parameter $\sigma$, the edge weights are given by $A_{ij}=\kappa(X_i,X_j)$ and $B_{ij}=\kappa(Y_i,Y_j)$ for some link function $\kappa$. The goal is to recover the hidden vertex correspondence $\pi^*$ based on the observation of $A$ and $B$. We focus on the dot-product model with $\kappa(x,y)=\langle x, y \rangle$ and Euclidean distance model with $\kappa(x,y)=\|x-y\|^2$, in the low-dimensional regime of $d=o(\log n)$ wherein the underlying geometric structures are most evident. We derive an approximate maximum likelihood estimator, which provably achieves, with high probability, perfect recovery of $\pi^*$ when $\sigma=o(n^{-2/d})$ and almost perfect recovery with a vanishing fraction of errors when $\sigma=o(n^{-1/d})$. Furthermore, these conditions are shown to be information-theoretically optimal even when the latent coordinates $\{X_i\}$ and $\{Y_i\}$ are observed, complementing the recent results of [DCK19] and [KNW22] in geometric models of the planted bipartite matching problem. As a side discovery, we show that the celebrated spectral algorithm of [Ume88] emerges as a further approximation to the maximum likelihood in the geometric model., Comment: Corrected some typos

Mapping and localization are two essential tasks for mobile robots in real-world applications. However, largescale and dynamic scenes challenge the accuracy and robustness of most current mature solutions. This situation becomes even worse when computational resources are limited. In this paper, we present a novel lightweight object-level mapping and localization method with high accuracy and robustness. Different from previous methods, our method does not need a prior constructed precise geometric map, which greatly releases the storage burden, especially for large-scale navigation. We use object-level features with both semantic and geometric information to model landmarks in the environment. Particularly, a learning topological primitive is first proposed to efficiently obtain and organize the object-level landmarks. On the basis of this, we use a robot-centric mapping framework to represent the environment as a semantic topology graph and relax the burden of maintaining global consistency at the same time. Besides, a hierarchical memory management mechanism is introduced to improve the efficiency of online mapping with limited computational resources. Based on the proposed map, the robust localization is achieved by constructing a novel local semantic scene graph descriptor, and performing multi-constraint graph matching to compare scene similarity. Finally, we test our method on a low-cost embedded platform to demonstrate its advantages. Experimental results on a large scale and multi-session real-world environment show that the proposed method outperforms the state of arts in terms of lightweight and robustness., Comment: 9 pages, 12 figures, 23 references

Most image matching methods perform poorly when encountering large scale changes in images. To solve this problem, firstly, we propose a scale-difference-aware image matching method (SDAIM) that reduces image scale differences before local feature extraction, via resizing both images of an image pair according to an estimated scale ratio. Secondly, in order to accurately estimate the scale ratio, we propose a covisibility-attention-reinforced matching module (CVARM) and then design a novel neural network, termed as Scale-Net, based on CVARM. The proposed CVARM can lay more stress on covisible areas within the image pair and suppress the distraction from those areas visible in only one image. Quantitative and qualitative experiments confirm that the proposed Scale-Net has higher scale ratio estimation accuracy and much better generalization ability compared with all the existing scale ratio estimation methods. Further experiments on image matching and relative pose estimation tasks demonstrate that our SDAIM and Scale-Net are able to greatly boost the performance of representative local features and state-of-the-art local feature matching methods.

We propose a new procedure for testing whether two networks are edge-correlated through some latent vertex correspondence. The test statistic is based on counting the co-occurrences of signed trees for a family of non-isomorphic trees. When the two networks are Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi random graphs $\mathcal{G}(n,q)$ that are either independent or correlated with correlation coefficient $\rho$, our test runs in $n^{2+o(1)}$ time and succeeds with high probability as $n\to\infty$, provided that $n\min\{q,1-q\} \ge n^{-o(1)}$ and $\rho^2>\alpha \approx 0.338$, where $\alpha$ is Otter's constant so that the number of unlabeled trees with $K$ edges grows as $(1/\alpha)^K$. This significantly improves the prior work in terms of statistical accuracy, running time, and graph sparsity.

We consider the classical problems of estimating the mean of an $n$-dimensional normally (with identity covariance matrix) or Poisson distributed vector under the squared loss. In a Bayesian setting the optimal estimator is given by the prior-dependent conditional mean. In a frequentist setting various shrinkage methods were developed over the last century. The framework of empirical Bayes, put forth by Robbins (1956), combines Bayesian and frequentist mindsets by postulating that the parameters are independent but with an unknown prior and aims to use a fully data-driven estimator to compete with the Bayesian oracle that knows the true prior. The central figure of merit is the regret, namely, the total excess risk over the Bayes risk in the worst case (over the priors). Although this paradigm was introduced more than 60 years ago, little is known about the asymptotic scaling of the optimal regret in the nonparametric setting. We show that for the Poisson model with compactly supported and subexponential priors, the optimal regret scales as $\Theta((\frac{\log n}{\log\log n})^2)$ and $\Theta(\log^3 n)$, respectively, both attained by the original estimator of Robbins. For the normal mean model, the regret is shown to be at least $\Omega((\frac{\log n}{\log\log n})^2)$ and $\Omega(\log^2 n)$ for compactly supported and subgaussian priors, respectively, the former of which resolves the conjecture of Singh (1979) on the impossibility of achieving bounded regret; before this work, the best regret lower bound was $\Omega(1)$. In addition to the empirical Bayes setting, these results are shown to hold in the compound setting where the parameters are deterministic. As a side application, the construction in this paper also leads to improved or new lower bounds for density estimation of Gaussian and Poisson mixtures.

We report on Cr doping effect in Mn3Sn polycrystalline films with both uniform and modulation doping. It is found that Cr doping with low concentration does not cause notable changes to the structural and magnetic properties of Mn3Sn, but it significantly enhances the anomalous Hall conductivity, particularly for modulation-doped samples at low temperature. A Hall conductivity as high as 184.8 {\Omega}-1 cm-1 is obtained for modulation-doped samples at 50 K, in a sharp contrast to vanishingly small values for undoped samples at the same temperature. We attribute the enhancement to the change of Fermi level induced by Cr doping, Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures

We study the following learning problem with dependent data: Observing a trajectory of length $n$ from a stationary Markov chain with $k$ states, the goal is to predict the next state. For $3 \leq k \leq O(\sqrt{n})$, using techniques from universal compression, the optimal prediction risk in Kullback-Leibler divergence is shown to be $\Theta(\frac{k^2}{n}\log \frac{n}{k^2})$, in contrast to the optimal rate of $\Theta(\frac{\log \log n}{n})$ for $k=2$ previously shown in Falahatgar et al. (2016). These rates, slower than the parametric rate of $O(\frac{k^2}{n})$, can be attributed to the memory in the data, as the spectral gap of the Markov chain can be arbitrarily small. To quantify the memory effect, we study irreducible reversible chains with a prescribed spectral gap. In addition to characterizing the optimal prediction risk for two states, we show that, as long as the spectral gap is not excessively small, the prediction risk in the Markov model is $O(\frac{k^2}{n})$, which coincides with that of an iid model with the same number of parameters. Extensions to higher-order Markov chains are also obtained., Comment: New results for higher-order Markov chains, 66 pages

We study a variant of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (S-K) spin glass model with external field, where the random symmetric couplings matrix does not consist of i.i.d. entries but is instead orthogonally invariant in law. For sufficiently high temperature, we prove a replica-symmetric formula for the first-order limit of the model free energy. Our analysis is an adaptation of a conditional second-moment-method argument previously introduced by Bolthausen for studying the high-temperature regime of the S-K model, where one conditions on the iterates of an Approximate Message Passing (AMP) algorithm for solving the TAP equations for the model magnetization. We apply this method using a memory-free version of AMP that is tailored to the orthogonally invariant structure of the model couplings.

This survey provides an exposition of a suite of techniques based on the theory of polynomials, collectively referred to as polynomial methods, which have recently been applied to address several challenging problems in statistical inference successfully. Topics including polynomial approximation, polynomial interpolation and majorization, moment space and positive polynomials, orthogonal polynomials and Gaussian quadrature are discussed, with their major probabilistic and statistical applications in property estimation on large domains and learning mixture models. These techniques provide useful tools not only for the design of highly practical algorithms with provable optimality, but also for establishing the fundamental limits of the inference problems through the method of moment matching. The effectiveness of the polynomial method is demonstrated in concrete problems such as entropy and support size estimation, distinct elements problem, and learning Gaussian mixture models., Comment: Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory: Vol. 17: No. 4, pp 402-586, 2020. ISBN to printed book: 978-1-68083-730-8. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1807.07237

We study the problem of reconstructing a perfect matching $M^*$ hidden in a randomly weighted $n\times n$ bipartite graph. The edge set includes every node pair in $M^*$ and each of the $n(n-1)$ node pairs not in $M^*$ independently with probability $d/n$. The weight of each edge $e$ is independently drawn from the distribution $\mathcal{P}$ if $e \in M^*$ and from $\mathcal{Q}$ if $e \notin M^*$. We show that if $\sqrt{d} B(\mathcal{P},\mathcal{Q}) \le 1$, where $B(\mathcal{P},\mathcal{Q})$ stands for the Bhattacharyya coefficient, the reconstruction error (average fraction of misclassified edges) of the maximum likelihood estimator of $M^*$ converges to $0$ as $n\to \infty$. Conversely, if $\sqrt{d} B(\mathcal{P},\mathcal{Q}) \ge 1+\epsilon$ for an arbitrarily small constant $\epsilon>0$, the reconstruction error for any estimator is shown to be bounded away from $0$ under both the sparse and dense model, resolving the conjecture in [Moharrami et al. 2019, Semerjian et al. 2020]. Furthermore, in the special case of complete exponentially weighted graph with $d=n$, $\mathcal{P}=\exp(\lambda)$, and $\mathcal{Q}=\exp(1/n)$, for which the sharp threshold simplifies to $\lambda=4$, we prove that when $\lambda \le 4-\epsilon$, the optimal reconstruction error is $\exp\left( - \Theta(1/\sqrt{\epsilon}) \right)$, confirming the conjectured infinite-order phase transition in [Semerjian et al. 2020].

This paper studies the problem of recovering the hidden vertex correspondence between two edge-correlated random graphs. We focus on the Gaussian model where the two graphs are complete graphs with correlated Gaussian weights and the Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi model where the two graphs are subsampled from a common parent Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi graph $\mathcal{G}(n,p)$. For dense graphs with $p=n^{-o(1)}$, we prove that there exists a sharp threshold, above which one can correctly match all but a vanishing fraction of vertices and below which correctly matching any positive fraction is impossible, a phenomenon known as the "all-or-nothing" phase transition. Even more strikingly, in the Gaussian setting, above the threshold all vertices can be exactly matched with high probability. In contrast, for sparse Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi graphs with $p=n^{-\Theta(1)}$, we show that the all-or-nothing phenomenon no longer holds and we determine the thresholds up to a constant factor. Along the way, we also derive the sharp threshold for exact recovery, sharpening the existing results in Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi graphs. The proof of the negative results builds upon a tight characterization of the mutual information based on the truncated second-moment computation and an "area theorem" that relates the mutual information to the integral of the reconstruction error. The positive results follows from a tight analysis of the maximum likelihood estimator that takes into account the cycle structure of the induced permutation on the edges.