Despite the fact that distributed systems have become a crucial aspect of modern technology and support many of the software systems that enable modern life, developers experience challenges in performing regression testing of these systems. Existing solutions for testing distributed systems are often either: (1) specialized testing environments that are created specifically for each system by its development team, which requires substantial effort for each team, with little-to-no sharing of this effort across teams; or (2) randomized injection tools that are often computationally expensive and offer no guarantees of preventing regressions, due to their randomness. The challenge of providing a generalized and practical solution to trigger bugs for reproducing and demonstrating failures, as well as to guard against regressions, is largely unaddressed. In this work, we present RediI, an infrastructure for supporting regression testing of distributed systems. RediI contains a dataset of real bugs on common distributed systems, along with a generalizable testing framework RediT that enables developers to write tests that can reproduce failures by providing ways to deterministically control distributed execution. In addition to the real failures in RediIfrom multiple distributed systems, RediT provides a reusable, programmable, platform-agnostic, deterministic testing framework for developers of distributed systems. It can help automate the running of such tests, for both practitioners and researchers. We demonstrate RediT with 63 bugs that we selected in Jira on 7 large and widely used distributed systems. Our case studies show that RediI can be used to allow developers to write tests that effectively reproduce failures on distributed systems and generate specific scenarios for regression testing, as well as providing deterministic failure injection that can help developers and researchers to better understand deterministic failures that may occur in distributed systems in the future. Additionally, our studies show that RediI is efficient for real-world system regression testing, providing a powerful tool for developers and researchers in the field of distributed-system testing.

EEG-based person identification enables applications in security, personalized brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), and cognitive monitoring. However, existing techniques often rely on deep learning architectures at high computational cost, limiting their scope of applications. In this study, we propose a novel EEG person identification approach using spiking neural networks (SNNs) with a lightweight spiking transformer for efficiency and effectiveness. The proposed SNN model is capable of handling the temporal complexities inherent in EEG signals. On the EEG-Music Emotion Recognition Challenge dataset, the proposed model achieves 100% classification accuracy with less than 10% energy consumption of traditional deep neural networks. This study offers a promising direction for energy-efficient and high-performance BCIs. The source code is available at https://github.com/PatrickZLin/Decode-ListenerIdentity.

Object-goal navigation is a challenging task that requires guiding an agent to specific objects based on first-person visual observations. The ability of agent to comprehend its surroundings plays a crucial role in achieving successful object finding. However, existing knowledge-graph-based navigators often rely on discrete categorical one-hot vectors and vote counting strategy to construct graph representation of the scenes, which results in misalignment with visual images. To provide more accurate and coherent scene descriptions and address this misalignment issue, we propose the Aligning Knowledge Graph with Visual Perception (AKGVP) method for object-goal navigation. Technically, our approach introduces continuous modeling of the hierarchical scene architecture and leverages visual-language pre-training to align natural language description with visual perception. The integration of a continuous knowledge graph architecture and multimodal feature alignment empowers the navigator with a remarkable zero-shot navigation capability. We extensively evaluate our method using the AI2-THOR simulator and conduct a series of experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our navigator.

This paper explores how to boost the performance of current person re-identification (ReID) models by incorporating auxiliary information such as contour sketch. Most current ReID methods consider only RGB images as input, with little attention on extra yet important information contained in other modal images. We propose a dual-modal model (DMM), consisting of a main stream that inputs RGB images, and an auxiliary stream that inputs other modal images, to explore how the auxiliary information will help to promote the performance of existing ReID models. To fuse these two streams, a novel dual-modal attention (DMA) mechanism is proposed. Specifically, we apply spatial attention to auxiliary feature maps to take full advantage of the informative spatial locations contained in this stream. Then channel attention is applied to the spatially refined main feature maps, resulting in further refined representations. Moreover, we adopt DMA at multiple scales to exploit different semantics from low to high levels, which finally generates more discriminative feature representations. Comprehensive experiments on publicly available datasets, Market1501, DukeMTMC, MSMT17, and Black ReID, show that our proposal achieves SOTA results.

Gaze-Following aims to predict the gaze target of a subject within an image, and information on orientation and depth greatly improves this task. However, previous methods require additional datasets to obtain depth or orientation information, leading to cumbersome training or inference processes. To this end, we propose an end-to-end depth-aware gaze-following approach that incorporates depth and orientation information without additional datasets. Our approach identifies a primary task, gaze-following, supervised by true labels from the gaze-following dataset and two auxiliary tasks, scene depth estimation and 3D orientation estimation, supervised by generated pseudo labels. Intermediate auxiliary features are integrated into the primary task network as implicit information. We propose a residual filter module for screening useful information that can enhance gaze-following prediction performance. Extensive experiments on GazeFollow and VideoAttentionTarget show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results (0.120 Ave. Dist. achieved on GazeFollow and 0.104 L2 Dist. achieved on VideoAttentionTarget). Finally, we apply our approach to a real robot for understanding human attention and intention. Compared to the previous depth considered gaze-following method, our method saves half of the computation time.

Gaze-Following is a complex task that needs to combine the gaze with the scene. Previous works performed well on predicting single-person gaze-following but expensive computations are impractical to the real-world project. Moreover, when there are multiple people appearing at the same time, previous works will excecute repeated scene feature extraction. In addition, obtaining gaze target point through the heatmap argmax method seems to be a convention for gaze-following while the quantization error of the heatmap is ignored. In this paper, a simple but efficient network structure is proposed to provide shared scene features for the multi-person gaze-following, and a numerical coordinate regression is firstly introduced to calculate the gaze target point and regression loss. Our experiments show that the accuracy of our method can achieve SOTA on both GazeFollow dataset and VideoAttentionTarget dataset. At the same time, by using the ghostnet, the FLOPs of our method is only about 1/18 of other methods with the same accuracy. Further, sharing scene features saves nearly 40% of inference time in multi-person gaze-following task when more than 6 people in the frame.