Perhaps, the modern definition of AI - as the ensemble of computer systems empowered with the ability to learn from data through statistical techniques - can be dated back to 1959. Machine Learning (ML), a subclass of AI, is a discipline that aims at studying algorithms that are able to learn from experience and data to perform tasks without following explicit instructions. Often, these algorithms are based on a computational model that belongs to differentiable programming techniques, called Neural Networks (NNs). The success of such algorithms resides in their ability to learn to achieve a specific goal [95, 121], i.e., they learn to discover hidden patterns and relations among data to fulfill the task at hand [89, 120]. Mathematically, NNs are made of a sequence of transformations, called layers, composed of affine operators and elementwise nonlinearities. Then, the goal of learning is to modify the transformations' parameters to fulfill a task successfully. Whenever a model accounts for more than a couple of such layers, it is called a Deep Learning (DL) model or a Deep Neural Network (DNN). Thanks to their enormous representation power and the development of new technologies and training algorithms, DL models obtained astonishing results in the last two decades, achieving superhuman performance on certain tasks [177].

Abstract--We study the problem of efficient semantic segmentation of large-scale 3D point clouds. By relying on expensive sampling techniques or computationally heavy pre/post-processing steps, most existing approaches are only able to be trained and operate over small-scale point clouds. In this paper, we introduce RandLA-Net, an efficient and lightweight neural architecture to directly infer per-point semantics for large-scale point clouds. The key to our approach is to use random point sampling instead of more complex point selection approaches. Although remarkably computation and memory efficient, random sampling can discard key features by chance. To overcome this, we introduce a novel local feature aggregation module to progressively increase the receptive field for each 3D point, thereby effectively preserving geometric details. Comparative experiments show that our RandLA-Net can process 1 million points in a single pass up to 200 faster than existing approaches. Moreover, extensive experiments on five large-scale point cloud datasets, including Semantic3D, SemanticKITTI, Toronto3D, NPM3D and S3DIS, demonstrate the state-of-the-art semantic segmentation performance of our RandLA-Net. A key challenge is that the raw point clouds acquired by depth sensors are typically irregularly sampled, unstructured and unordered. Recently, the pioneering work PointNet [4] has emerged as a promising approach for directly processing 3D point clouds. It learns per-point features using shared multilayer perceptrons (MLPs). This is computationally efficient but fails to capture wider context information for each point.

Recent studies show that hierarchical Vision Transformer with interleaved non-overlapped intra window self-attention \& shifted window self-attention is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance in various visual recognition tasks and challenges CNN's dense sliding window paradigm. Most follow-up works try to replace shifted window operation with other kinds of cross window communication while treating self-attention as the de-facto standard for intra window information aggregation. In this short preprint, we question whether self-attention is the only choice for hierarchical Vision Transformer to attain strong performance, and what makes for hierarchical Vision Transformer? We replace self-attention layers in Swin Transformer and Shuffle Transformer with simple linear mapping and keep other components unchanged. The resulting architecture with 25.4M parameters and 4.2G FLOPs achieves 80.5\% Top-1 accuracy, compared to 81.3\% for Swin Transformer with 28.3M parameters and 4.5G FLOPs. We also experiment with other alternatives to self-attention for context aggregation inside each non-overlapped window, which all give similar competitive results under the same architecture. Our study reveals that the \textbf{macro architecture} of Swin model families (i.e., interleaved intra window \& cross window communications), other than specific aggregation layers or specific means of cross window communication, may be more responsible for its strong performance and is the real challenger to CNN's dense sliding window paradigm.

This paper presents a teleoperation system that includes robot perception and intent prediction from hand gestures. The perception module identifies the objects present in the robot workspace and the intent prediction module which object the user likely wants to grasp. This architecture allows the approach to rely on traded control instead of direct control: we use hand gestures to specify the goal objects for a sequential manipulation task, the robot then autonomously generates a grasping or a retrieving motion using trajectory optimization. The perception module relies on the model-based tracker to precisely track the 6D pose of the objects and makes use of a state of the art learning-based object detection and segmentation method, to initialize the tracker by automatically detecting objects in the scene. Goal objects are identified from user hand gestures using a trained a multi-layer perceptron classifier. After presenting all the components of the system and their empirical evaluation, we present experimental results comparing our pipeline to a direct traded control approach (i.e., one that does not use prediction) which shows that using intent prediction allows to bring down the overall task execution time.

Recent advances in self-attention and pure multi-layer perceptrons (MLP) models for vision have shown great potential in achieving promising performance with fewer inductive biases. These models are generally based on learning interaction among spatial locations from raw data. The complexity of self-attention and MLP grows quadratically as the image size increases, which makes these models hard to scale up when high-resolution features are required. In this paper, we present the Global Filter Network (GFNet), a conceptually simple yet computationally efficient architecture, that learns long-term spatial dependencies in the frequency domain with log-linear complexity. Our architecture replaces the self-attention layer in vision transformers with three key operations: a 2D discrete Fourier transform, an element-wise multiplication between frequency-domain features and learnable global filters, and a 2D inverse Fourier transform. We exhibit favorable accuracy/complexity trade-offs of our models on both ImageNet and downstream tasks. Our results demonstrate that GFNet can be a very competitive alternative to transformer-style models and CNNs in efficiency, generalization ability and robustness. Code is available at https://github.com/raoyongming/GFNet

We consider infinitely-wide multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) which are limits of standard deep feed-forward neural networks. We assume that, for each layer, the weights of an MLP are initialized with i.i.d. samples from either a light-tailed (finite variance) or heavy-tailed distribution in the domain of attraction of a symmetric $\alpha$-stable distribution, where $\alpha\in(0,2]$ may depend on the layer. For the bias terms of the layer, we assume i.i.d. initializations with a symmetric $\alpha$-stable distribution having the same $\alpha$ parameter of that layer. We then extend a recent result of Favaro, Fortini, and Peluchetti (2020), to show that the vector of pre-activation values at all nodes of a given hidden layer converges in the limit, under a suitable scaling, to a vector of i.i.d. random variables with symmetric $\alpha$-stable distributions.

If you want to take a particular decision on a given task, for example, if a bank wants to approve a credit card for a person, they check a certain number of criteria to approve or deny. This classification task can be done through Perceptron Algorithm; however, today they are many hybrid algorithms that work behind for approving the credit card or any binary classification task. Perceptron is a very simple supervised learning algorithm used for a binary classification task. The binary can give only two options 0 or 1, yes or no, approve or deny, etc. The weights are w1, w2, w3….wdxd, and features are x1, x2, x3…xd and then add bias term b that determines 0 or 1, approve or deny, yes or no, etc.

A Feed Forward Neural Network is commonly seen in its simplest form as a single layer perceptron. In this model, a series of inputs enter the layer and are multiplied by the weights. Each value is then added together to get a sum of the weighted input values. If the sum of the values is above a specific threshold, usually set at zero, the value produced is often 1, whereas if the sum falls below the threshold, the output value is -1. The single layer perceptron is an important model of feed forward neural networks and is often used in classification tasks. Furthermore, single layer perceptrons can incorporate aspects of machine learning.

Nowadays, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) following the Message Passing paradigm become the dominant way to learn on graphic data. Models in this paradigm have to spend extra space to look up adjacent nodes with adjacency matrices and extra time to aggregate multiple messages from adjacent nodes. To address this issue, we develop a method called LinkDist that distils self-knowledge from connected node pairs into a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) without the need to aggregate messages. Experiment with 8 real-world datasets shows the MLP derived from LinkDist can predict the label of a node without knowing its adjacencies but achieve comparable accuracy against GNNs in the contexts of semi- and full-supervised node classification. Moreover, LinkDist benefits from its Non-Message Passing paradigm that we can also distil self-knowledge from arbitrarily sampled node pairs in a contrastive way to further boost the performance of LinkDist.

Transfer learning has become the dominant paradigm for many natural language processing tasks. In addition to models being pretrained on large datasets, they can be further trained on intermediate (supervised) tasks that are similar to the target task. For small Natural Language Inference (NLI) datasets, language modelling is typically followed by pretraining on a large (labelled) NLI dataset before fine-tuning with each NLI subtask. In this work, we explore Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDTs) as an alternative to the commonly used Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) classification head. GBDTs have desirable properties such as good performance on dense, numerical features and are effective where the ratio of the number of samples w.r.t the number of features is low. We then introduce FreeGBDT, a method of fitting a GBDT head on the features computed during fine-tuning to increase performance without additional computation by the neural network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on several NLI datasets using a strong baseline model (RoBERTa-large with MNLI pretraining). The FreeGBDT shows a consistent improvement over the MLP classification head.