Improving the Generalizability of Trajectory Prediction Models with Frenet-Based Domain Normalization

Predicting the future trajectories of nearby objects plays a pivotal role in Robotics and Automation such as autonomous driving. While learning-based trajectory prediction methods have achieved remarkable performance on public benchmarks, the generalization ability of these approaches remains questionable. The poor generalizability on unseen domains, a well-recognized defect of data-driven approaches, can potentially harm the real-world performance of trajectory prediction models. We are thus motivated to improve generalization ability of models instead of merely pursuing high accuracy on average. Due to the lack of benchmarks for quantifying the generalization ability of trajectory predictors, we first construct a new benchmark called argoverse-shift, where the data distributions of domains are significantly different. Using this benchmark for evaluation, we identify that the domain shift problem seriously hinders the generalization of trajectory predictors since state-of-the-art approaches suffer from severe performance degradation when facing those out-of-distribution scenes. To enhance the robustness of models against domain shift problem, we propose a plug-and-play strategy for domain normalization in trajectory prediction. Our strategy utilizes the Frenet coordinate frame for modeling and can effectively narrow the domain gap of different scenes caused by the variety of road geometry and topology. Experiments show that our strategy noticeably boosts the prediction performance of the state-of-the-art in domains that were previously unseen to the models, thereby improving the generalization ability of data-driven trajectory prediction methods.Comment: This paper was accepted by 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA

Implementation of 30-Year Land Use Rights for Farmers under China\u27s 1998 Land Management Law: An Analysis and Recommendations Based on a 17 Province Survey

Recent legal and policy measures demonstrate the commitment of China\u27s central leadership to the development and implementation of a legal framework providing long-term, secure land tenure to its nearly 800 million farmers. The results of a 17 province, 1,621 household survey conducted in August 1999 show that considerable progress has already been made toward this goal. However, a number of key issues related to both the implementation of existing legal rules and the development of additional legislation addressing rural land rights must be addressed for the process to be complete

Angiogenic deficiency and adipose tissue dysfunction are associated with macrophage malfunction in SIRT1 \u3csup\u3e-/-\u3c/sup\u3e mice

The histone deacetylase sirtuin 1 (SIRT1) inhibits adipocyte differentiation and suppresses inflammation by targeting the transcription factors peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor γ and nuclear factor κB. Although this suggests that adiposity and inflammation should be enhanced when SIRT1 activity is inactivated in the body, this hypothesis has not been tested in SIRT1 null (SIRT1 -/-) mice. In this study, we addressed this issue by investigating the adipose tissue in SIRT1 -/-mice. Compared with their wild-type littermates, SIRT1 null mice exhibited a significant reduction in body weight. In adipose tissue, the average size of adipocytes was smaller, the content of extracellular matrix was lower, adiponectin and leptin were expressed at 60% of normal level, and adipocyte differentiation was reduced. All of these changes were observed with a 50% reduction in capillary density that was determined using a three-dimensional imaging technique. Except for vascular endothelial growth factor, the expression of several angiogenic factors (Pdgf, Hgf, endothelin, apelin, and Tgf-β)was reduced by about 50%. Macrophage infiltration and inflammatory cytokine expression were 70% less in the adipose tissue of null mice and macrophage differentiation was significantly inhibited in SIRT1 -/- mouse embryonic fibroblasts in vitro. In wild-type mice, macrophage deletion led to a reduction in vascular density. These data suggest that SIRT1 controls adipose tissue function through regulation of angiogenesis, whose deficiency is associated with macrophage malfunction in SIRT1 -/- mice. The study supports the concept that inflammation regulates angiogenesis in the adipose tissue. Copyright © 2012 by The Endocrine Society

Consensus Kernel K

Multiview clustering aims to improve clustering performance through optimal integration of information from multiple views. Though demonstrating promising performance in various applications, existing multiview clustering algorithms cannot effectively handle the view’s incompleteness. Recently, one pioneering work was proposed that handled this issue by integrating multiview clustering and imputation into a unified learning framework. While its framework is elegant, we observe that it overlooks the consistency between views, which leads to a reduction in the clustering performance. In order to address this issue, we propose a new unified learning method for incomplete multiview clustering, which simultaneously imputes the incomplete views and learns a consistent clustering result with explicit modeling of between-view consistency. More specifically, the similarity between each view’s clustering result and the consistent clustering result is measured. The consistency between views is then modeled using the sum of these similarities. Incomplete views are imputed to achieve an optimal clustering result in each view, while maintaining between-view consistency. Extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world incomplete multiview datasets validate the superiority of the proposed method

Temperature-induced decoupling of phycobilisomes from reaction centers

AbstractTemperature-induced decoupling of phycobilisomes (PBSs) from the reaction centers in the PBS-thylakoid membrane complexes was observed at 0°C. The fluorescence yields of photosystem (PS) I and PSII decreased and that of PBSs increased with selective excitation of PBSs at 0°C, while the yield of PBSs decreased and those of the two photosystems increased with selective excitation of chlorophyll a at room temperature (RT). It indicated that the decoupling of PBSs from the two photosystems led to changes of energy transfer efficiencies, which can be explained by partial detachment of PBSs from thylakoid membrane. The temperature-dependent processes were reversible, i.e. with temperature going up to RT, the complexes could restore to the functionally coupled state with a time constant about 30 s. Based on these results, it could be deduced that PBSs should be in parallel connection with the two photosystems