Mingfu Liang is a former research intern in the Machine Learning department of NEC Laboratories America, Inc. while studying at  Northwestern University.

Posts

AIDE: An Automatic Data Engine for Object Detection in Autonomous Driving

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Autonomous vehicle (AV) systems rely on robust perception models as a cornerstone of safety assurance. However, objects encountered on the road exhibit a long-tailed distribution, with rare or unseen categories posing challenges to a deployed perception model. This necessitates an expensive process of continuously curating and annotating data with significant human effort. We propose to leverage recent advances in vision-language and large language models to design an Automatic Data Engine (AIDE) that automatically identifies issues, efficiently curates data, improves the model through auto-labeling, and verifies the model through generation of diverse scenarios. This process operates iteratively, allowing for continuous self-improvement of the model. We further establish a benchmark for open-world detection on AV datasets to comprehensively evaluate various learning paradigms, demonstrating our method’s superior performance at a reduced cost.

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Exploring Compositional Visual Generation with Latent Classifier Guidance

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Diffusion probabilistic models have achieved enormous success in the field of image generation and manipulation. In this paper, we explore a novel paradigm of using the diffusion model and classifier guidance in the latent semantic space for compositional visual tasks. Specifically, we train latent diffusion models and auxiliary latent classifiers to facilitate non-linear navigation of latent representation generation for any pre-trained generative model with a semantic latent space. We demonstrate that such conditional generation achieved by latent classifier guidance provably maximizes a lower bound of the conditional log probability during training. To maintain the original semantics during manipulation, we introduce a new guidance term, which we show is crucial for achieving compositionality. With additional assumptions, we show that the non-linear manipulation reduces to a simple latent arithmetic approach. We show that this paradigm based on latent classifier guidance is agnostic to pre-trained generative models, and present competitive results for both image generation and sequential manipulation of real and synthetic images. Our findings suggest that latent classifier guidance is a promising approach that merits further exploration, even in the presence of other strong competing methods.

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