Lightweight Estimation of Hand Mesh and Biomechanically Feasible Kinematic Parameters

3D hand pose estimation is a long-standing challenge in both robotics and computer vision communities due to its implicit depth ambiguity and often strong self-occlusion. Recently, in addition to the hand skeleton, jointly estimating hand pose and shape has gained more attraction. State-of-the-art methods adopt a model-free approach, estimating the vertices of the hand mesh directly and providing superior accuracy compared to traditional model-based methods directly regressing the parameters of the parametric hand mesh. However, with the large number of mesh vertices to estimate, these methods are often slow in inference. We propose an efficient variation of the previously proposed image-to-lixel approach to efficiently estimate hand meshes from the images. Leveraging recent developments in efficient neural architectures, we significantly reduce the computation complexity without sacrificing the estimation accuracy. Furthermore, we introduce an inverted kinematic(IK) network to translate the estimated hand mesh to a biomechanically feasible set of joint rotation parameters, which is necessary for applications that leverage pose estimation for controlling robotic hands. Finally, an optional post-processing module is proposed to refine the rotation and shape parameters to compensate for the error introduced by the IK net. Our Lite I2L Mesh Net achieves state-of-the-art joint and mesh estimation accuracy with less than $13\%$ of the total computational complexity of the original I2L hand mesh estimator. Adding the IK net and post-optimization modules can improve the accuracy slightly at a small computation cost, but more importantly, provide the kinematic parameters required for robotic applications

Robust High-dimensional Tuning Free Multiple Testing

A stylized feature of high-dimensional data is that many variables have heavy tails, and robust statistical inference is critical for valid large-scale statistical inference. Yet, the existing developments such as Winsorization, Huberization and median of means require the bounded second moments and involve variable-dependent tuning parameters, which hamper their fidelity in applications to large-scale problems. To liberate these constraints, this paper revisits the celebrated Hodges-Lehmann (HL) estimator for estimating location parameters in both the one- and two-sample problems, from a non-asymptotic perspective. Our study develops Berry-Esseen inequality and Cram\'{e}r type moderate deviation for the HL estimator based on newly developed non-asymptotic Bahadur representation, and builds data-driven confidence intervals via a weighted bootstrap approach. These results allow us to extend the HL estimator to large-scale studies and propose \emph{tuning-free} and \emph{moment-free} high-dimensional inference procedures for testing global null and for large-scale multiple testing with false discovery proportion control. It is convincingly shown that the resulting tuning-free and moment-free methods control false discovery proportion at a prescribed level. The simulation studies lend further support to our developed theory.Comment: In this paper, we develop tuning-free and moment-free high dimensional inference procedures

Communication-Efficient Distributed Estimation and Inference for Cox's Model

Motivated by multi-center biomedical studies that cannot share individual data due to privacy and ownership concerns, we develop communication-efficient iterative distributed algorithms for estimation and inference in the high-dimensional sparse Cox proportional hazards model. We demonstrate that our estimator, even with a relatively small number of iterations, achieves the same convergence rate as the ideal full-sample estimator under very mild conditions. To construct confidence intervals for linear combinations of high-dimensional hazard regression coefficients, we introduce a novel debiased method, establish central limit theorems, and provide consistent variance estimators that yield asymptotically valid distributed confidence intervals. In addition, we provide valid and powerful distributed hypothesis tests for any coordinate element based on a decorrelated score test. We allow time-dependent covariates as well as censored survival times. Extensive numerical experiments on both simulated and real data lend further support to our theory and demonstrate that our communication-efficient distributed estimators, confidence intervals, and hypothesis tests improve upon alternative methods

Spectral Ranking Inferences based on General Multiway Comparisons

This paper studies the performance of the spectral method in the estimation and uncertainty quantification of the unobserved preference scores of compared entities in a very general and more realistic setup in which the comparison graph consists of hyper-edges of possible heterogeneous sizes and the number of comparisons can be as low as one for a given hyper-edge. Such a setting is pervasive in real applications, circumventing the need to specify the graph randomness and the restrictive homogeneous sampling assumption imposed in the commonly-used Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) or Plackett-Luce (PL) models. Furthermore, in the scenarios when the BTL or PL models are appropriate, we unravel the relationship between the spectral estimator and the Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE). We discover that a two-step spectral method, where we apply the optimal weighting estimated from the equal weighting vanilla spectral method, can achieve the same asymptotic efficiency as the MLE. Given the asymptotic distributions of the estimated preference scores, we also introduce a comprehensive framework to carry out both one-sample and two-sample ranking inferences, applicable to both fixed and random graph settings. It is noteworthy that it is the first time effective two-sample rank testing methods are proposed. Finally, we substantiate our findings via comprehensive numerical simulations and subsequently apply our developed methodologies to perform statistical inferences on statistics journals and movie rankings

System-status-aware Adaptive Network for Online Streaming Video Understanding

Recent years have witnessed great progress in deep neural networks for real-time applications. However, most existing works do not explicitly consider the general case where the device's state and the available resources fluctuate over time, and none of them investigate or address the impact of varying computational resources for online video understanding tasks. This paper proposes a System-status-aware Adaptive Network (SAN) that considers the device's real-time state to provide high-quality predictions with low delay. Usage of our agent's policy improves efficiency and robustness to fluctuations of the system status. On two widely used video understanding tasks, SAN obtains state-of-the-art performance while constantly keeping processing delays low. Moreover, training such an agent on various types of hardware configurations is not easy as the labeled training data might not be available, or can be computationally prohibitive. To address this challenging problem, we propose a Meta Self-supervised Adaptation (MSA) method that adapts the agent's policy to new hardware configurations at test-time, allowing for easy deployment of the model onto other unseen hardware platforms.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 202

Learning-Based Client Selection for Federated Learning Services Over Wireless Networks with Constrained Monetary Budgets

We investigate a data quality-aware dynamic client selection problem for multiple federated learning (FL) services in a wireless network, where each client offers dynamic datasets for the simultaneous training of multiple FL services, and each FL service demander has to pay for the clients under constrained monetary budgets. The problem is formalized as a non-cooperative Markov game over the training rounds. A multi-agent hybrid deep reinforcement learning-based algorithm is proposed to optimize the joint client selection and payment actions, while avoiding action conflicts. Simulation results indicate that our proposed algorithm can significantly improve training performance.Comment: 6 pages,8 figure