Student Talks
MSR Thesis Talk: Ken Liu
Title: On Privacy and Personalization in Federated Learning: Analyses and Applications Abstract: Recent advances in machine learning often rely on large and centralized datasets. However, curating such data can be challenging when they hold private information, and policies/regulations may mandate that they remain distributed across data silos (e.g. mobile devices or hospitals). Federated learning (FL) [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk: Haolun Zhang
Title: Seeing in 3D: Towards Generalizable 3D Visual Representations for Robotic Manipulation Abstract: Despite the recent progress in computer vision and deep learning, robot perception remains a tremendous challenge due to the variations of the objects and the scenes in manipulation tasks. Ideally, a robot trying to manipulate a new object should be able to [...]
MSR Thesis Talk: Muyang Li
Title: Efficient Spatially Sparse Inference for Conditional GANs and Diffusion Models Abstract: During image editing, existing deep generative models tend to re-synthesize the entire output from scratch, including the unedited regions. This leads to a significant waste of computation, especially for minor editing operations. In this work, we present Spatially Sparse Inference (SSI), a general-purpose technique [...]
3D-aware Conditional Image Synthesis
Abstract: We propose pix2pix3D, a 3D-aware conditional generative model for controllable photorealistic image synthesis. Given a 2D label map, such as a segmentation or edge map, our model learns to synthesize a corresponding image from different viewpoints. To enable explicit 3D user control, we extend conditional generative models with neural radiance fields. Given widely-available posed [...]
Robotic Climbing for Extreme Terrain Exploration
Abstract: Climbing robots can investigate scientifically valuable sites that are inaccessible to conventional rovers due to steep terrain features. Robots equipped with microspine grippers are particularly well-suited to ascending rocky cliff faces, but existing designs are either large and slow, or limited to relatively flat surfaces such as buildings. We have developed a novel free-climbing [...]
MSR Thesis Talk: Rohan Zeng
Title: Spectral Unmixing and Mapping of Coral Reef Benthic Cover Abstract: Coral reefs are important to the global ecosystem and the local communities and wildlife that rely on the habitat they create. However, coral reefs are also in critical and rapid decline: reefs have degraded over recent decades and what remains is at increasing risk [...]
MSR Thesis Talk: Ashwin Misra
Title: Learn2Plan: Learning variable ordering heuristics for scalable task planning Abstract: Traditional approaches to planning attempt to transform a system into a goal state by applying specific actions in a specific order. In these methods, there is an exponential search space due to considering many possible actions at every decision point. Hierarchical Task Networks use incremental [...]
MSR Thesis Talk: Andrew Jong
Title: Robot Information Gathering for Dynamic Systems in Wildfire Scenarios Abstract: The monitoring of complex dynamic systems, such as those encountered in disaster response, search and rescue, wildlife conservation, and environmental monitoring, presents the fundamental challenge of how to track efficiently with limited resources and partial observability. This thesis presents algorithms and techniques for robotic [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Visual Dataset Pipeline: From Curation to Long-Tail Learning
Abstract: Computer vision models have proven to be tremendously capable of recognizing and detecting several real-world objects: cars, people, pets. These models are only possible due to a meticulous pipeline where a task and application is first conceived followed by an appropriate dataset curation that collects and labels all necessary data. Commonly, studies are focused [...]
MSR Thesis Talk: Erin Wong
Title: Edge Detection by Centimeter Scale Low-Cost Mobile Robots Abstract: In Search and Rescue (SaR) efforts after natural disasters like earthquakes, the primary focus is to find and rescue people in building rubble. These rescue efforts could put first responders at risk and are slow due to the unstable nature of the environment. Robotic solutions [...]