Daily Papers

Monocular 3D lane detection is a challenging task due to its lack of depth information. A popular solution is to first transform the front-viewed (FV) images or features into the bird-eye-view (BEV) space with inverse perspective mapping (IPM) and detect lanes from BEV features. However, the reliance of IPM on flat ground assumption and loss of context information make it inaccurate to restore 3D information from BEV representations. An attempt has been made to get rid of BEV and predict 3D lanes from FV representations directly, while it still underperforms other BEV-based methods given its lack of structured representation for 3D lanes. In this paper, we define 3D lane anchors in the 3D space and propose a BEV-free method named Anchor3DLane to predict 3D lanes directly from FV representations. 3D lane anchors are projected to the FV features to extract their features which contain both good structural and context information to make accurate predictions. In addition, we also develop a global optimization method that makes use of the equal-width property between lanes to reduce the lateral error of predictions. Extensive experiments on three popular 3D lane detection benchmarks show that our Anchor3DLane outperforms previous BEV-based methods and achieves state-of-the-art performances. The code is available at: https://github.com/tusen-ai/Anchor3DLane.

It has been shown that deep neural networks of a large enough width are universal approximators but they are not if the width is too small. There were several attempts to characterize the minimum width w_{min} enabling the universal approximation property; however, only a few of them found the exact values. In this work, we show that the minimum width for L^p approximation of L^p functions from [0,1]^{d_x} to mathbb R^{d_y} is exactly max{d_x,d_y,2} if an activation function is ReLU-Like (e.g., ReLU, GELU, Softplus). Compared to the known result for ReLU networks, w_{min}=max{d_x+1,d_y} when the domain is mathbb R^{d_x}, our result first shows that approximation on a compact domain requires smaller width than on mathbb R^{d_x}. We next prove a lower bound on w_{min} for uniform approximation using general activation functions including ReLU: w_{min}ge d_y+1 if d_x<d_yle2d_x. Together with our first result, this shows a dichotomy between L^p and uniform approximations for general activation functions and input/output dimensions.

The study of universal approximation properties (UAP) for neural networks (NN) has a long history. When the network width is unlimited, only a single hidden layer is sufficient for UAP. In contrast, when the depth is unlimited, the width for UAP needs to be not less than the critical width w^*_{min}=max(d_x,d_y), where d_x and d_y are the dimensions of the input and output, respectively. Recently, cai2022achieve shows that a leaky-ReLU NN with this critical width can achieve UAP for L^p functions on a compact domain K, i.e., the UAP for L^p(K,R^{d_y}). This paper examines a uniform UAP for the function class C(K,R^{d_y}) and gives the exact minimum width of the leaky-ReLU NN as w_{min}=max(d_x+1,d_y)+1_{d_y=d_x+1}, which involves the effects of the output dimensions. To obtain this result, we propose a novel lift-flow-discretization approach that shows that the uniform UAP has a deep connection with topological theory.

The magnitude of a finite metric space has recently emerged as a novel invariant quantity, allowing to measure the effective size of a metric space. Despite encouraging first results demonstrating the descriptive abilities of the magnitude, such as being able to detect the boundary of a metric space, the potential use cases of magnitude remain under-explored. In this work, we investigate the properties of the magnitude on images, an important data modality in many machine learning applications. By endowing each individual images with its own metric space, we are able to define the concept of magnitude on images and analyse the individual contribution of each pixel with the magnitude vector. In particular, we theoretically show that the previously known properties of boundary detection translate to edge detection abilities in images. Furthermore, we demonstrate practical use cases of magnitude for machine learning applications and propose a novel magnitude model that consists of a computationally efficient magnitude computation and a learnable metric. By doing so, we address the computational hurdle that used to make magnitude impractical for many applications and open the way for the adoption of magnitude in machine learning research.

Magnitude of a finite metric space and the related notion of magnitude functions on metric spaces is an active area of research in algebraic topology. Magnitude originally arose in the context of biology, where it represents the number of effective species in an environment; when applied to a one-parameter family of metric spaces tX with scale parameter t, the magnitude captures much of the underlying geometry of the space. Prior work has mostly focussed on properties of magnitude in a global sense; in this paper we restrict the sets to finite subsets of Euclidean space and investigate its individual components. We give an explicit formula for the corrected inclusion-exclusion principle, and define a quantity associated with each point, called the moment which gives an intrinsic ordering to the points. We exploit this in order to form an algorithm which approximates the convex hull.

We study the impact on mechanisms for facility location of moving from one dimension to two (or more) dimensions and Euclidean or Manhattan distances. We consider three fundamental axiomatic properties: anonymity which is a basic fairness property, Pareto optimality which is one of the most important efficiency properties, and strategy proofness which ensures agents do not have an incentive to mis-report. We also consider how well such mechanisms can approximate the optimal welfare. Our results are somewhat negative. Moving from one dimension to two (or more) dimensions often makes these axiomatic properties more difficult to achieve. For example, with two facilities in Euclidean space or with just a single facility in Manhattan space, no mechanism is anonymous, Pareto optimal and strategy proof. By contrast, mechanisms on the line exist with all three properties.We also show that approximation ratios may increase when moving to two (or more) dimensions. All our impossibility results are minimal. If we drop one of the three axioms (anonymity, Pareto optimality or strategy proofness) multiple mechanisms satisfy the other two axioms.

Given a finite poset mathcal P, the hypercube-height, denoted by h^*(mathcal P), is defined to be the largest h such that, for any natural number n, the subsets of [n] of size less than h do not contain an induced copy of mathcal P. The hypercube-width, denoted by w^*(mathcal P), is the smallest w such that the subsets of [w] of size at most h^*(mathcal P) contain an induced copy of mathcal P. In other words, h^*(mathcal P) asks how `low' can a poset be embedded, and w^*(mathcal P) asks for the first hypercube in which such an `optimal' embedding occurs. These notions were introduced by Bastide, Groenland, Ivan and Johnston in connection to upper bounds for the poset saturation numbers. While it is not hard to see that h^*(mathcal P)leq |mathcal P|-1 (and this bound can be tight), the hypercube-width has proved to be much more elusive. It was shown by the authors mentioned above that w^*(mathcal P)leq|mathcal P|^2/4, but they conjectured that in fact w^*(mathcal P)leq |mathcal P| for any finite poset mathcal P. In this paper we prove this conjecture. The proof uses Hall's theorem for bipartite graphs as a precision tool for modifing an existing copy of our poset.

Based on the theory of homogeneous spaces we derive geometrically optimal edge attributes to be used within the flexible message-passing framework. We formalize the notion of weight sharing in convolutional networks as the sharing of message functions over point-pairs that should be treated equally. We define equivalence classes of point-pairs that are identical up to a transformation in the group and derive attributes that uniquely identify these classes. Weight sharing is then obtained by conditioning message functions on these attributes. As an application of the theory, we develop an efficient equivariant group convolutional network for processing 3D point clouds. The theory of homogeneous spaces tells us how to do group convolutions with feature maps over the homogeneous space of positions R^3, position and orientations R^3 {times} S^2, and the group SE(3) itself. Among these, R^3 {times} S^2 is an optimal choice due to the ability to represent directional information, which R^3 methods cannot, and it significantly enhances computational efficiency compared to indexing features on the full SE(3) group. We support this claim with state-of-the-art results -- in accuracy and speed -- on five different benchmarks in 2D and 3D, including interatomic potential energy prediction, trajectory forecasting in N-body systems, and generating molecules via equivariant diffusion models.

A recurrent neural network (RNN) is a widely used deep-learning network for dealing with sequential data. Imitating a dynamical system, an infinite-width RNN can approximate any open dynamical system in a compact domain. In general, deep networks with bounded widths are more effective than wide networks in practice; however, the universal approximation theorem for deep narrow structures has yet to be extensively studied. In this study, we prove the universality of deep narrow RNNs and show that the upper bound of the minimum width for universality can be independent of the length of the data. Specifically, we show that a deep RNN with ReLU activation can approximate any continuous function or L^p function with the widths d_x+d_y+2 and max{d_x+1,d_y}, respectively, where the target function maps a finite sequence of vectors in R^{d_x} to a finite sequence of vectors in R^{d_y}. We also compute the additional width required if the activation function is tanh or more. In addition, we prove the universality of other recurrent networks, such as bidirectional RNNs. Bridging a multi-layer perceptron and an RNN, our theory and proof technique can be an initial step toward further research on deep RNNs.

We study the chromatic number of typical triangle-free graphs with Theta left( n^{3/2} (log n)^{1/2} right) edges and establish the width of the scaling window for the transitions from chi = 3 to chi = 4 and from chi = 4 to chi = 5. The transition from 3- to 4-colorability has scaling window of width Theta(n^{4/3} (log n)^{-1/3}). To prove this, we show a high probability equivalence of the 3-colorability of a random triangle-free graph at this density and the satisfiability of an instance of bipartite random 2-SAT, for which we establish the width of the scaling window following the techniques of Bollob{\'a}s, Borgs, Chayes, Kim, and Wilson. The transition from 4- to 5-colorability has scaling window of width Theta(n^{3/2} (log n)^{-1/2}). To prove this, we show a high probability equivalence of the 4-colorability of a random triangle-free graph at this density and the simultaneous 2-colorability of two independent Erdos--R\'enyi random graphs. For this transition, we also establish the limiting probability of 4-colorability inside the scaling window.

Adapting standard methods from geometric measure theory, we provide an example of a polynomial-valued measure mu on tame sets in R^d which satisfies many desirable properties. Among these is strict monotonicity: the measure of a proper subset is strictly less than the measure of the whole set. Using techniques from non-standard analysis, we display that the domain of mu can be extended to all subsets of R^d (up to equivalence modulo infinitesimals). The resulting extension is a numerosity function that encodes the i-dimensional Hausdorff measure for all iin N, as well as the i-th intrinsic volume functions.

In state-of-the-art self-supervised learning (SSL) pre-training produces semantically good representations by encouraging them to be invariant under meaningful transformations prescribed from human knowledge. In fact, the property of invariance is a trivial instance of a broader class called equivariance, which can be intuitively understood as the property that representations transform according to the way the inputs transform. Here, we show that rather than using only invariance, pre-training that encourages non-trivial equivariance to some transformations, while maintaining invariance to other transformations, can be used to improve the semantic quality of representations. Specifically, we extend popular SSL methods to a more general framework which we name Equivariant Self-Supervised Learning (E-SSL). In E-SSL, a simple additional pre-training objective encourages equivariance by predicting the transformations applied to the input. We demonstrate E-SSL's effectiveness empirically on several popular computer vision benchmarks, e.g. improving SimCLR to 72.5% linear probe accuracy on ImageNet. Furthermore, we demonstrate usefulness of E-SSL for applications beyond computer vision; in particular, we show its utility on regression problems in photonics science. Our code, datasets and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/rdangovs/essl to aid further research in E-SSL.

As its width tends to infinity, a deep neural network's behavior under gradient descent can become simplified and predictable (e.g. given by the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK)), if it is parametrized appropriately (e.g. the NTK parametrization). However, we show that the standard and NTK parametrizations of a neural network do not admit infinite-width limits that can learn features, which is crucial for pretraining and transfer learning such as with BERT. We propose simple modifications to the standard parametrization to allow for feature learning in the limit. Using the *Tensor Programs* technique, we derive explicit formulas for such limits. On Word2Vec and few-shot learning on Omniglot via MAML, two canonical tasks that rely crucially on feature learning, we compute these limits exactly. We find that they outperform both NTK baselines and finite-width networks, with the latter approaching the infinite-width feature learning performance as width increases. More generally, we classify a natural space of neural network parametrizations that generalizes standard, NTK, and Mean Field parametrizations. We show 1) any parametrization in this space either admits feature learning or has an infinite-width training dynamics given by kernel gradient descent, but not both; 2) any such infinite-width limit can be computed using the Tensor Programs technique. Code for our experiments can be found at github.com/edwardjhu/TP4.