AlignFlow: Cycle Consistent Learning from Multiple Domains via Normalizing Flows

Given datasets from multiple domains, a key challenge is to efficiently exploit these data sources for modeling a target domain. Variants of this problem have been studied in many contexts, such as cross-domain translation and domain adaptation. We propose AlignFlow, a generative modeling framework that models each domain via a normalizing flow. The use of normalizing flows allows for a) flexibility in specifying learning objectives via adversarial training, maximum likelihood estimation, or a hybrid of the two methods; and b) learning and exact inference of a shared representation in the latent space of the generative model. We derive a uniform set of conditions under which AlignFlow is marginally-consistent for the different learning objectives. Furthermore, we show that AlignFlow guarantees exact cycle consistency in mapping datapoints from a source domain to target and back to the source domain. Empirically, AlignFlow outperforms relevant baselines on image-to-image translation and unsupervised domain adaptation and can be used to simultaneously interpolate across the various domains using the learned representation.Comment: AAAI 202

A Geometric Approach to Sound Source Localization from Time-Delay Estimates

This paper addresses the problem of sound-source localization from time-delay estimates using arbitrarily-shaped non-coplanar microphone arrays. A novel geometric formulation is proposed, together with a thorough algebraic analysis and a global optimization solver. The proposed model is thoroughly described and evaluated. The geometric analysis, stemming from the direct acoustic propagation model, leads to necessary and sufficient conditions for a set of time delays to correspond to a unique position in the source space. Such sets of time delays are referred to as feasible sets. We formally prove that every feasible set corresponds to exactly one position in the source space, whose value can be recovered using a closed-form localization mapping. Therefore we seek for the optimal feasible set of time delays given, as input, the received microphone signals. This time delay estimation problem is naturally cast into a programming task, constrained by the feasibility conditions derived from the geometric analysis. A global branch-and-bound optimization technique is proposed to solve the problem at hand, hence estimating the best set of feasible time delays and, subsequently, localizing the sound source. Extensive experiments with both simulated and real data are reported; we compare our methodology to four state-of-the-art techniques. This comparison clearly shows that the proposed method combined with the branch-and-bound algorithm outperforms existing methods. These in-depth geometric understanding, practical algorithms, and encouraging results, open several opportunities for future work.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures, 3 table, journa

Distributed Detection and Estimation in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this article we consider the problems of distributed detection and estimation in wireless sensor networks. In the first part, we provide a general framework aimed to show how an efficient design of a sensor network requires a joint organization of in-network processing and communication. Then, we recall the basic features of consensus algorithm, which is a basic tool to reach globally optimal decisions through a distributed approach. The main part of the paper starts addressing the distributed estimation problem. We show first an entirely decentralized approach, where observations and estimations are performed without the intervention of a fusion center. Then, we consider the case where the estimation is performed at a fusion center, showing how to allocate quantization bits and transmit powers in the links between the nodes and the fusion center, in order to accommodate the requirement on the maximum estimation variance, under a constraint on the global transmit power. We extend the approach to the detection problem. Also in this case, we consider the distributed approach, where every node can achieve a globally optimal decision, and the case where the decision is taken at a central node. In the latter case, we show how to allocate coding bits and transmit power in order to maximize the detection probability, under constraints on the false alarm rate and the global transmit power. Then, we generalize consensus algorithms illustrating a distributed procedure that converges to the projection of the observation vector onto a signal subspace. We then address the issue of energy consumption in sensor networks, thus showing how to optimize the network topology in order to minimize the energy necessary to achieve a global consensus. Finally, we address the problem of matching the topology of the network to the graph describing the statistical dependencies among the observed variables.Comment: 92 pages, 24 figures. To appear in E-Reference Signal Processing, R. Chellapa and S. Theodoridis, Eds., Elsevier, 201

Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications, and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees, active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and Is SLAM solved

Pairwise MRF Calibration by Perturbation of the Bethe Reference Point

We investigate different ways of generating approximate solutions to the pairwise Markov random field (MRF) selection problem. We focus mainly on the inverse Ising problem, but discuss also the somewhat related inverse Gaussian problem because both types of MRF are suitable for inference tasks with the belief propagation algorithm (BP) under certain conditions. Our approach consists in to take a Bethe mean-field solution obtained with a maximum spanning tree (MST) of pairwise mutual information, referred to as the \emph{Bethe reference point}, for further perturbation procedures. We consider three different ways following this idea: in the first one, we select and calibrate iteratively the optimal links to be added starting from the Bethe reference point; the second one is based on the observation that the natural gradient can be computed analytically at the Bethe point; in the third one, assuming no local field and using low temperature expansion we develop a dual loop joint model based on a well chosen fundamental cycle basis. We indeed identify a subclass of planar models, which we refer to as \emph{Bethe-dual graph models}, having possibly many loops, but characterized by a singly connected dual factor graph, for which the partition function and the linear response can be computed exactly in respectively O(N) and $O(N^2)$ operations, thanks to a dual weight propagation (DWP) message passing procedure that we set up. When restricted to this subclass of models, the inverse Ising problem being convex, becomes tractable at any temperature. Experimental tests on various datasets with refined $L_0$ or $L_1$ regularization procedures indicate that these approaches may be competitive and useful alternatives to existing ones.Comment: 54 pages, 8 figure. section 5 and refs added in V