44 research outputs found
Urban Spatial Structure and the Potential for Vehicle Miles Traveled Reduction: The Effects of Accessibility to Jobs within and beyond Employment Sub-centers
This research examines the relationship between urban polycentric spatial
structure and driving. We identified 46 employment sub-centers in the Los
Angeles Combined Statistical Area and calculated access to jobs that are within
and beyond these sub-centers. To address potential endogeneity problems, we use
access to historically important places and transportation infrastructure in
the early 20th century as instrumental variables for job accessibility indices.
Our Two-stage Tobit models show that access to jobs is negatively associated
with household vehicle miles traveled in this region. Among various
accessibility measures, access to jobs outside sub-centers has the largest
elasticity (-0.155). We examine the location of places in the top quintile of
access to non-centered jobs and find that those locations are often inner ring
suburban developments, near the core of the urban area and not far from
sub-centers, suggesting that strategies of infill development that fill in the
gaps between sub-centers, rather than focusing on already accessible downtowns
and large sub-centers, may be the best land use approach to reduce VMT
LMC: Fast Training of GNNs via Subgraph Sampling with Provable Convergence
The message passing-based graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved great
success in many real-world applications. However, training GNNs on large-scale
graphs suffers from the well-known neighbor explosion problem, i.e., the
exponentially increasing dependencies of nodes with the number of message
passing layers. Subgraph-wise sampling methods -- a promising class of
mini-batch training techniques -- discard messages outside the mini-batches in
backward passes to avoid the neighbor explosion problem at the expense of
gradient estimation accuracy. This poses significant challenges to their
convergence analysis and convergence speeds, which seriously limits their
reliable real-world applications. To address this challenge, we propose a novel
subgraph-wise sampling method with a convergence guarantee, namely Local
Message Compensation (LMC). To the best of our knowledge, LMC is the {\it
first} subgraph-wise sampling method with provable convergence. The key idea of
LMC is to retrieve the discarded messages in backward passes based on a message
passing formulation of backward passes. By efficient and effective
compensations for the discarded messages in both forward and backward passes,
LMC computes accurate mini-batch gradients and thus accelerates convergence. We
further show that LMC converges to first-order stationary points of GNNs.
Experiments on large-scale benchmark tasks demonstrate that LMC significantly
outperforms state-of-the-art subgraph-wise sampling methods in terms of
efficiency
The Strong Consistency of the Estimator of Fixed-Design Regression Model under Negatively Dependent Sequences
We study the strong consistency of estimator of fixed design regression model under negatively dependent sequences by using the classical Rosenthal-type inequality and the truncated method. As an application, the strong consistency for the nearest neighbor estimator is obtained
Chat-3D v2: Bridging 3D Scene and Large Language Models with Object Identifiers
Recent research has evidenced the significant potentials of Large Language
Models (LLMs) in handling challenging tasks within 3D scenes. However, current
models are constrained to addressing object-centric tasks, where each
question-answer pair focuses solely on an individual object. In real-world
applications, users may pose queries involving multiple objects or expect for
answers that precisely reference various objects. We introduce the use of
object identifiers to freely reference objects during a conversation. While
this solution appears straightforward, it presents two main challenges: 1) How
to establish a reliable one-to-one correspondence between each object and its
identifier? 2) How to incorporate complex spatial relationships among dozens of
objects into the embedding space of the LLM? To address these challenges, we
propose a two-stage alignment method, which involves learning an
attribute-aware token and a relation-aware token for each object. These tokens
capture the object's attributes and spatial relationships with surrounding
objects in the 3D scene. Once the alignment is established, we can fine-tune
our model on various downstream tasks using instruction tuning. Experiments
conducted on traditional datasets like ScanQA, ScanRefer, and Nr3D/Sr3D
showcase the effectiveness of our proposed method. Additionally, we create a 3D
scene captioning dataset annotated with rich object identifiers, with the
assistant of GPT-4. This dataset aims to further explore the capability of
object identifiers in effective object referencing and precise scene
understanding
Distilling Coarse-to-Fine Semantic Matching Knowledge for Weakly Supervised 3D Visual Grounding
3D visual grounding involves finding a target object in a 3D scene that
corresponds to a given sentence query. Although many approaches have been
proposed and achieved impressive performance, they all require dense
object-sentence pair annotations in 3D point clouds, which are both
time-consuming and expensive. To address the problem that fine-grained
annotated data is difficult to obtain, we propose to leverage weakly supervised
annotations to learn the 3D visual grounding model, i.e., only coarse
scene-sentence correspondences are used to learn object-sentence links. To
accomplish this, we design a novel semantic matching model that analyzes the
semantic similarity between object proposals and sentences in a coarse-to-fine
manner. Specifically, we first extract object proposals and coarsely select the
top-K candidates based on feature and class similarity matrices. Next, we
reconstruct the masked keywords of the sentence using each candidate one by
one, and the reconstructed accuracy finely reflects the semantic similarity of
each candidate to the query. Additionally, we distill the coarse-to-fine
semantic matching knowledge into a typical two-stage 3D visual grounding model,
which reduces inference costs and improves performance by taking full advantage
of the well-studied structure of the existing architectures. We conduct
extensive experiments on ScanRefer, Nr3D, and Sr3D, which demonstrate the
effectiveness of our proposed method.Comment: ICCV202
The Minnesota Bicycle and Pedestrian Counting Initiative: Methodologies for Non-motorized Traffic Monitoring
The purpose of this project was to develop methodologies for monitoring non-motorized traffic in Minnesota. The project included an inventory of bicycle and pedestrian monitoring programs; development of guidance for manual, field counts; pilot field counts in 43 Minnesota communities; and analyses of automated, continuous-motorized counts from locations in Minneapolis. The analyses showed hourly, daily, and monthly patterns are comparable despite variation in volumes and that adjustment factors can be used to extrapolate short-term counts and estimate annual traffic. The project technical advisory panel made five recommendations: (1) MnDOT should continue and institutionalize coordination of annual statewide manual bicycle and pedestrian counts; (2) MnDOT should improve methods for reporting results of field counts and explore web-based programs for data reporting and analysis; (3) MnDOT should lead efforts to deploy and demonstrate the feasibility of new automated technologies for bicycle and pedestrian counting, focusing on new technologies not presently used in Minnesota; (4) MnDOT should begin integration of non-motorized traffic counts from existing automated, continuous counters in Minneapolis into its new databases for vehicular traffic monitoring data; and (5) MnDOT should work with local governments and explore institutional arrangements for (a) establishing a network of permanent, automated continuous monitoring sites across the state and (b) sharing and deploying new technologies for short-duration monitoring to generate traffic counts that provide a more comprehensive understanding of spatial variation in nonmotorized traffic volumes.Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota; Department of Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota; Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern Californi
Connecting Multi-modal Contrastive Representations
Multi-modal Contrastive Representation learning aims to encode different
modalities into a semantically aligned shared space. This paradigm shows
remarkable generalization ability on numerous downstream tasks across various
modalities. However, the reliance on massive high-quality data pairs limits its
further development on more modalities. This paper proposes a novel
training-efficient method for learning MCR without paired data called
Connecting Multi-modal Contrastive Representations (C-MCR). Specifically, given
two existing MCRs pre-trained on (A, B) and (B, C) modality pairs, we project
them to a new space and use the data from the overlapping modality B to
aligning the two MCRs in the new space. Meanwhile, since the modality pairs (A,
B) and (B, C) are already aligned within each MCR, the connection learned by
overlapping modality can also be transferred to non-overlapping modality pair
(A, C). To unleash the potential of C-MCR, we further introduce a
semantic-enhanced inter- and intra-MCR connection method. We first enhance the
semantic consistency and completion of embeddings across different modalities
for more robust alignment. Then we utilize the inter-MCR alignment to establish
the connection, and employ the intra-MCR alignment to better maintain the
connection for inputs from non-overlapping modalities. To demonstrate the
effectiveness of C-MCR, we connect CLIP and CLAP via texts to derive
audio-visual representations, and integrate CLIP and ULIP via images for
3D-language representations. Remarkably, without using any paired data, C-MCR
for audio-visual achieves state-of-the-art performance on audio-image
retrieval, audio-visual source localization, and counterfactual audio-image
recognition tasks. Furthermore, C-MCR for 3D-language also attains advanced
zero-shot 3D point cloud classification accuracy on ModelNet40.Comment: NeurIPS 202
The association of lipid metabolism with bone metabolism and the role of human traits: a Mendelian randomization study
BackgroundThe impact of lipid metabolism on bone metabolism remains controversial, and the extent to which human traits mediate the effects of lipid metabolism on bone metabolism remains unclear.ObjectiveThis study utilized mendelian randomization to investigate the effects of blood lipids on bone mineral density (BMD) at various skeletal sites and examined the mediating role of human traits in this process.MethodsWe leveraged genetic data from large-scale genome-wide association studies on blood lipids (n=1,320,016), forearm bone mineral density (FA-BMD) (n=10,805), lumbar spine bone mineral density (LS-BMD) (n=44,731), and femoral neck bone mineral density (FN-BMD) (n=49,988) to infer causal relationships between lipid and bone metabolism. The coefficient product method was employed to calculate the indirect effects of human traits and the proportion of mediating effects.ResultsThe results showed that a 1 standard deviation(SD) increase in HDL-C, LDL-C and TC was associated with a decrease in LS-BMD of 0.039 g/cm2, 0.045 g/cm2 and 0.054 g/cm2, respectively. The proportion of mediating effects of systolic blood pressure (SBP) on HDL-C to LS-BMD was 3.17%, but suppression effects occurred in the causal relationship of LDL-C and TC to LS-BMD. Additionally, the proportion of mediating effects of hand grip strength (HGS) on the TC to LS-BMD pathway were 6.90% and 4.60% for the left and right hands, respectively.ConclusionIn conclusion, a negative causal relationship was established between lipid metabolism and bone metabolism. Our results indicated that SBP and HGS served as mediators for the effects of lipid metabolism on bone metabolism
The Atypical Effective Connectivity of Right Temporoparietal Junction in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Multi-Site Study
Social function impairment is the core deficit of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Although many studies have investigated ASD through a variety of neuroimaging tools, its brain mechanism of social function remains unclear due to its complex and heterogeneous symptoms. The present study aimed to use resting-state functional magnetic imaging data to explore effective connectivity between the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), one of the key brain regions associated with social impairment of individuals with ASD, and the whole brain to further deepen our understanding of the neuropathological mechanism of ASD. This study involved 1,454 participants from 23 sites from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) public dataset, which included 618 individuals with ASD and 836 with typical development (TD). First, a voxel-wise Granger causality analysis (GCA) was conducted with the RTPJ selected as the region of interest (ROI) to investigate the differences in effective connectivity between the ASD and TD groups in every site. Next, to obtain further accurate and representative results, an image-based meta-analysis was implemented to further analyze the GCA results of each site. Our results demonstrated abnormal causal connectivity between the RTPJ and the widely distributed brain regions and that the connectivity has been associated with social impairment in individuals with ASD. The current study could help to further elucidate the pathological mechanisms of ASD and provides a new perspective for future research
Accessibility to Jobs Outside Employment Sub-Centers Has a Larger Impact on VMT Reduction than Accessibility to Jobs Inside Employment Sub-Centers [Policy Brief]
This policy brief summarizes findings from a study to help close the gap by examining how access to jobs in employment sub-centers influences household VMT, using the five-county Los Angeles Combined Statistical Area as an example