In endovascular surgery, the precise identification of catheters and guidewires in X-ray images is essential for reducing intervention risks. However, accurately segmenting catheter and guidewire structures is challenging due to the limited availability of labeled data. Foundation models offer a promising solution by enabling the collection of similar-domain data to train models whose weights can be fine-tuned for downstream tasks. Nonetheless, large-scale data collection for training is constrained by the necessity of maintaining patient privacy. This paper proposes a new method to train a foundation model in a decentralized federated learning setting for endovascular intervention. To ensure the feasibility of the training, we tackle the unseen data issue using differentiable Earth Mover's Distance within a knowledge distillation frame-work. Once trained, our foundation model's weights provide valuable initialization for downstream tasks, thereby enhancing task-specific performance. Intensive experiments show that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results, contributing to advancements in endovascular intervention and robotic-assisted endovascular surgery, while addressing the critical issue of data sharing in the medical domain.

Traditional vision-based autonomous driving systems often face difficulties in navigating complex environments when relying solely on single-image inputs. To overcome this limitation, incorporating temporal data such as past image frames or steering sequences, has proven effective in enhancing robustness and adaptability in challenging scenarios. While previous high-performance methods exist, they often rely on resource-intensive fusion networks, making them impractical for training and unsuitable for federated learning. To address these challenges, we propose lightweight temporal transformer decomposition, a method that processes sequential image frames and temporal steering data by breaking down large attention maps into smaller matrices. This approach reduces model complexity, enabling efficient weight updates for convergence and real-time predictions while leveraging temporal information to enhance autonomous driving performance. Intensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms recent approaches by a clear margin while achieving real-time performance. Additionally, real robot experiments further confirm the effectiveness of our method. Our source code can be found at: https://github.com/aioz-ai/LTFed.

Federated learning has been widely applied in autonomous driving since it enables training a learning model among vehicles without sharing users’ data. However, data from autonomous vehicles usually suffer from the non-independent-and-identically-distributed (non-IID) problem, which may cause negative effects on the convergence of the learning process. In this paper, we propose a new contrastive divergence loss to address the non-IID problem in autonomous driving by reducing the impact of divergence factors from transmitted models during the local learning process of each silo. We also analyze the effects of contrastive divergence in various autonomous driving scenarios, under multiple network infrastructures, and with different centralized/distributed learning schemes. Our intensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our proposed contrastive divergence loss significantly improves the performance over current state-of-the-art approaches. Our source code is available at https://github.com/aioz-ai/CDL.

Music-driven choreography is a challenging problem with a wide variety of industrial applications. Recently, many methods have been proposed to synthesize dance motions from music for a single dancer. However, generating dance motion for a group remains an open problem. In this paper, we present AIOZ - GDANCE, a new large-scale dataset for music-driven group dance generation. Unlike existing datasets that only support single dance, our new dataset contains group dance videos, hence supporting the study of group choreography. We propose a semi-autonomous labeling method with humans in the loop to obtain the 3D ground truth for our dataset. The proposed dataset consists of 16.7 hours of paired music and 3D motion from in-the-wild videos, covering 7 dance styles and 16 music genres. We show that naively applying single dance generation technique to creating group dance motion may lead to unsatisfactory results, such as inconsistent movements and collisions between dancers. Based on our new dataset, we propose a new method that takes an input music sequence and a set of 3D positions of dancers to efficiently produce multiple group-coherent choreographies. We propose new evaluation metrics for measuring group dance quality and perform intensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our project facilitates future research on group dance generation and is available at https://aioz-ai.github.io/AIOZ-GDANCE/.

Federated learning is an active research topic since it enables several participants to jointly train a model without sharing local data. Currently, cross-silo federated learning is a popular training setting that utilizes a few hundred reliable data silos with high-speed access links to training a model. While this approach has been widely applied in real-world scenarios, designing a robust topology to reduce the training time remains an open problem. In this paper, we present a new multigraph topology for cross-silo federated learning. We first construct the multigraph using the overlay graph. We then parse this multigraph into different simple graphs with isolated nodes. The existence of isolated nodes allows us to perform model aggregation without waiting for other nodes, hence effectively reducing the training time. Intensive experiments on three public datasets show that our proposed method significantly reduces the training time compared with recent state-of-the-art topologies while maintaining the accuracy of the learned model. Our code can be found at: https://github.com/aioz-ai/MultigraphFL

Despite significant progress over the past few years, ambiguity is still a key challenge in Facial Expression Recognition (FER). It can lead to noisy and inconsistent annotation, which hinders the performance of deep learning models in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a new uncertainty-aware label distribution learning method to improve the robustness of deep models against uncertainty and ambiguity. We leverage neighborhood information in the valence-arousal space to adaptively construct emotiona distributions for training samples. We also consider the uncertainty of provided labels when incorporating them into the label distributions. Our method can be easily integrated into a deep network to obtain more training supervision and improve recognition accuracy. Intensive experiments on several datasets under various noisy and ambiguous settings show that our method achieves competitive results and outperforms recent state-of-the-art approaches. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/minhnhatvt/label-distribution-learning-fer-tf.

Music-driven group choreography poses a considerable challenge but holds significant potential for a wide range of industrial applications. The ability to generate synchronized and visually appealing group dance motions that are aligned with music opens up opportunities in many fields such as entertainment, advertising, and virtual performances. However, most of the recent works are not able to generate high-fidelity long-term motions, or fail to enable controllable experience. In this work, we aim to address the demand for high-quality and customizable group dance generation by effectively governing the consistency and diversity of group choreographies. In particular, we utilize a diffusion-based generative approach to enable the synthesis of flexible number of dancers and long-term group dances, while ensuring coherence to the input music. Ultimately, we introduce a Group Contrastive Diffusion (GCD) strategy to enhance the connection between dancers and their group, presenting the ability to control the consistency or diversity level of the synthesized group animation via the classifier-guidance sampling technique. Through intensive experiments and evaluation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in producing visually captivating and consistent group dance motions. The experimental results show the capability of our method to achieve the desired levels of consistency and diversity, while maintaining the overall quality of the generated group choreography.

Autonomous driving is an active research topic in both academia and industry. However, most of the existing solutions focus on improving the accuracy by training learnable models with centralized large-scale data. Therefore, these methods do not take into account the user’s privacy. In this paper, we present a new approach to learn autonomous driving policy while respecting privacy concerns. We propose a peer-to-peer Deep Federated Learning (DFL) approach to train deep architectures in a fully decentralized manner and remove the need for central orchestration. We design a new Federated Autonomous Driving network (FADNet) that can improve the model stability, ensure convergence, and handle imbalanced data distribution problems while is being trained with federated learning methods. Intensively experimental results on three datasets show that our approach with FADNet and DFL achieves superior accuracy compared with other recent methods. Furthermore, our approach can maintain privacy by not collecting user data to a central server. Our source code can be found at: https://github.com/aioz-ai/FADNet

Deformable registration is a crucial step in many medical procedures such as image-guided surgery and radiation therapy. Most recent learning-based methods focus on improving the accuracy by optimizing the non-linear spatial correspondence between the input images. Therefore, these methods are computationally expensive and require modern graphic cards for real-time deployment. In this paper, we introduce a new Light-weight Deformable Registration network that significantly reduces the computational cost while achieving competitive accuracy. In particular, we propose a new adversarial learning with distilling knowledge algorithm that successfully leverages meaningful information from the effective but expensive teacher network to the student network. We design the student network such as it is light-weight and well suitable for deployment on a typical CPU. The extensively experimental results on different public datasets show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while significantly faster than recent methods. We further show that the use of our adversarial learning algorithm is essential for a time-efficiency deformable registration method. Finally, our source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/aioz-ai/LDR_ALDK.

This paper contributes a new high-quality dataset for hand gesture recognition in hand hygiene systems, named "MFH". Generally, current datasets are not focused on: (i) fine-grained actions; and (ii) data mismatch between different viewpoints, which are available under realistic settings. To address the aforementioned issues, the MFH dataset is proposed to contain a total of 731147 samples obtained by different camera views in 6 non-overlapping locations. Additionally, each sample belongs to one of seven steps introduced by the World Health Organization (WHO). As a minor contribution, inspired by advances in fine-grained image recognition and distribution adaptation, this paper recommends using the self-supervised learning method to handle these preceding problems. The extensive experiments on the benchmarking MFH dataset show that the introduced method yields competitive performance in both the Accuracy and the Macro F1-score.

Autonomous navigation in complex environments is a crucial task in time-sensitive scenarios such as disaster response or search and rescue. However, complex environments pose significant challenges for autonomous platforms to navigate due to their challenging properties: constrained narrow passages, unstable pathway with debris and obstacles, or irregular geological structures and poor lighting conditions. In this work, we propose a multimodal fusion approach to address the problem of autonomous navigation in complex environments such as collapsed cites, or natural caves. We first simulate the complex environments in a physics-based simulation engine and collect a large-scale dataset for training. We then propose a Navigation Multimodal Fusion Network (NMFNet) which has three branches to effectively handle three visual modalities: laser, RGB images, and point cloud data. The extensively experimental results show that our NMFNet outperforms recent state of the art by a fair margin while achieving real-time performance. We further show that the use of multiple modalities is essential for autonomous navigation in complex environments. Finally, we successfully deploy our network to both simulated and real mobile robots.

In Visual Question Answering (VQA), answers have a great correlation with question meaning and visual contents. Thus, to selectively utilize image, question and answer information, we propose a novel trilinear interaction model which simultaneously learns high level associations between these three inputs. In addition, to overcome the interaction complexity, we introduce a multimodal tensor-based PARALIND decomposition which efficiently parameterizes trilinear teraction between the three inputs. Moreover, knowledge distillation is first time applied in Free-form Opened-ended VQA. It is not only for reducing the computational cost and required memory but also for transferring knowledge from trilinear interaction model to bilinear interaction model. The extensive experiments on benchmarking datasets TDIUC, VQA-2.0, and Visual7W show that the proposed compact trilinear interaction model achieves state-of-the-art results when using a single model on all three datasets.

The objective of this paper is to design an embedding method mapping local features describing image (e.g. SIFT) to a higher dimensional representation used for image retrieval problem. By investigating the relationship between the linear approximation of a nonlinear function in high dimensional space and state-of-the-art feature representation used in image retrieval, i.e., VLAD, we first introduce a new approach for the approximation. The embedded vectors resulted by the function approximation process are then aggregated to form a single representation used in the image retrieval framework. The evaluation shows that our embedding method gives a performance boost over the state of the art in image retrieval, as demonstrated by our experiments on the standard public image retrieval benchmarks.