Route Planning in Transportation Networks

We survey recent advances in algorithms for route planning in transportation networks. For road networks, we show that one can compute driving directions in milliseconds or less even at continental scale. A variety of techniques provide different trade-offs between preprocessing effort, space requirements, and query time. Some algorithms can answer queries in a fraction of a microsecond, while others can deal efficiently with real-time traffic. Journey planning on public transportation systems, although conceptually similar, is a significantly harder problem due to its inherent time-dependent and multicriteria nature. Although exact algorithms are fast enough for interactive queries on metropolitan transit systems, dealing with continent-sized instances requires simplifications or heavy preprocessing. The multimodal route planning problem, which seeks journeys combining schedule-based transportation (buses, trains) with unrestricted modes (walking, driving), is even harder, relying on approximate solutions even for metropolitan inputs.Comment: This is an updated version of the technical report MSR-TR-2014-4, previously published by Microsoft Research. This work was mostly done while the authors Daniel Delling, Andrew Goldberg, and Renato F. Werneck were at Microsoft Research Silicon Valle

xUnit: Learning a Spatial Activation Function for Efficient Image Restoration

In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) achieved unprecedented performance in many low-level vision tasks. However, state-of-the-art results are typically achieved by very deep networks, which can reach tens of layers with tens of millions of parameters. To make DNNs implementable on platforms with limited resources, it is necessary to weaken the tradeoff between performance and efficiency. In this paper, we propose a new activation unit, which is particularly suitable for image restoration problems. In contrast to the widespread per-pixel activation units, like ReLUs and sigmoids, our unit implements a learnable nonlinear function with spatial connections. This enables the net to capture much more complex features, thus requiring a significantly smaller number of layers in order to reach the same performance. We illustrate the effectiveness of our units through experiments with state-of-the-art nets for denoising, de-raining, and super resolution, which are already considered to be very small. With our approach, we are able to further reduce these models by nearly 50% without incurring any degradation in performance.Comment: Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 201

MeshfreeFlowNet: A Physics-Constrained Deep Continuous Space-Time Super-Resolution Framework

We propose MeshfreeFlowNet, a novel deep learning-based super-resolution framework to generate continuous (grid-free) spatio-temporal solutions from the low-resolution inputs. While being computationally efficient, MeshfreeFlowNet accurately recovers the fine-scale quantities of interest. MeshfreeFlowNet allows for: (i) the output to be sampled at all spatio-temporal resolutions, (ii) a set of Partial Differential Equation (PDE) constraints to be imposed, and (iii) training on fixed-size inputs on arbitrarily sized spatio-temporal domains owing to its fully convolutional encoder. We empirically study the performance of MeshfreeFlowNet on the task of super-resolution of turbulent flows in the Rayleigh-Benard convection problem. Across a diverse set of evaluation metrics, we show that MeshfreeFlowNet significantly outperforms existing baselines. Furthermore, we provide a large scale implementation of MeshfreeFlowNet and show that it efficiently scales across large clusters, achieving 96.80% scaling efficiency on up to 128 GPUs and a training time of less than 4 minutes.Comment: Supplementary Video: https://youtu.be/mjqwPch9gDo. Accepted to SC2