Tianrui Guan

Tianrui Guan

PhD student at University of Maryland, College Park |
A group member of GAMMA

email: rayguan [at] umd.edu

HallusionBench: You See What You Think? Or You Think What You See? An Image-Context Reasoning Benchmark Challenging for GPT-4V(ision), LLaVA-1.5, and Other Multi-modality Models

Fuxiao Liu*, Tianrui Guan*, Zongxia Li, Lichang Chen, Yaser Yacoob, Dinesh Manocha, Tianyi Zhou

Published in arxiv, 2023

Large language models (LLMs), after being aligned with vision models and integrated into vision-language models (VLMs), can bring impressive improvement in image reasoning tasks. This was shown by the recently released GPT-4V(ison), LLaVA-1.5, etc. However, the strong language prior in these SOTA LVLMs can be a double-edged sword: they may ignore the image context and solely rely on the (even contradictory) language prior for reasoning. In contrast, the vision modules in VLMs are weaker than LLMs and may result in misleading visual representations, which are then translated to confident mistakes by LLMs. To study these two types of VLM mistakes, i.e., language hallucination and visual illusion, we curated HallusionBench, an image-context reasoning benchmark that is still challenging to even GPT-4V and LLaVA-1.5. We provide a detailed analysis of examples in HallusionBench, which sheds novel insights on the illusion or hallucination of VLMs and how to improve them in the future. The benchmark and codebase will be released.

iPLAN: Intent-Aware Planning in Heterogeneous Traffic via Distributed Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Xiyang Wu, Rohan Chandra, Tianrui Guan, Amrit Singh Bedi, Dinesh Manocha

Published in Conference on Robot Learning, 2023

Navigating safely and efficiently in dense and heterogeneous traffic scenarios is challenging for autonomous vehicles (AVs) due to their inability to infer the behaviors or intentions of nearby drivers. In this work, we introduce a distributed multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithm that can predict trajectories and intents in dense and heterogeneous traffic scenarios. Our approach for intent-aware planning, iPLAN, allows agents to infer nearby drivers intents solely from their local observations. We model two distinct incentives for agents strategies: Behavioral Incentive for high-level decision-making based on their driving behavior or personality and Instant Incentive for motion planning for collision avoidance based on the current traffic state. Our approach enables agents to infer their opponents behavior incentives and integrate this inferred information into their decision-making and motion-planning processes. We perform experiments on two simulation environments, Non-Cooperative Navigation and Heterogeneous Highway. In Heterogeneous Highway, results show that, compared with centralized training decentralized execution (CTDE) MARL baselines such as QMIX and MAPPO, our method yields a 4.3% and 38.4% higher episodic reward in mild and chaotic traffic, with 48.1% higher success rate and 80.6% longer survival time in chaotic traffic. We also compare with a decentralized training decentralized execution (DTDE) baseline IPPO and demonstrate a higher episodic reward of 12.7% and 6.3% in mild traffic and chaotic traffic, 25.3% higher success rate, and 13.7% longer survival time.

CrossLoc3D: Aerial-Ground Cross-Source 3D Place Recognition

Tianrui Guan, Aswath Muthuselvam, Montana Hoover, Xijun Wang, Jing Liang, Adarsh Jagan Sathyamoorthy, Damon Conover, Dinesh Manocha

Published in International Conference on Computer Vision, 2023

We present CrossLoc3D, a novel 3D place recognition method that solves a large-scale point matching problem in a cross-source setting. Cross-source point cloud data corresponds to point sets captured by depth sensors with different accuracies or from different distances and perspectives. We address the challenges in terms of developing 3D place recognition methods that account for the representation gap between points captured by different sources. Our method handles cross-source data by utilizing multi-grained features and selecting convolution kernel sizes that correspond to most prominent features. Inspired by the diffusion models, our method uses a novel iterative refinement process that gradually shifts the embedding spaces from different sources to a single canonical space for better metric learning. In addition, we present CS-Campus3D, the first 3D aerial-ground cross-source dataset consisting of point cloud data from both aerial and ground LiDAR scans. The point clouds in CS-Campus3D have representation gaps and other features like different views, point densities, and noise patterns. We show that our CrossLoc3D algorithm can achieve an improvement of 4.74% - 15.37% in terms of the top 1 average recall on our CS-Campus3D benchmark and achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art 3D place recognition method on the Oxford RobotCar.

VINet: Visual and Inertial-based Terrain Classification and Adaptive Navigation over Unknown Terrain

Tianrui Guan, Ruitao Song, Zhixian Ye, Liangjun Zhang

Published in International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2023

We present a visual and inertial-based terrain classification network (VINet) for robotic navigation over different traversable surfaces. We use a novel navigation-based labeling scheme for terrain classification and generalization on unknown surfaces. Our proposed perception method and adaptive scheduling control framework can make predictions according to terrain navigation properties and lead to better performance on both terrain classification and navigation control on known and unknown surfaces. Our VINet can achieve 98.37% in terms of accuracy under supervised setting on known terrains and improve the accuracy by 8.51% on unknown terrains compared to previous methods. We deploy VINet on a mobile tracked robot for trajectory following and navigation on different terrains, and we demonstrate an improvement of 10.3% compared to a baseline controller in terms of RMSE.

VERN: Vegetation-aware Robot Navigation in Dense Unstructured Outdoor Environments

Adarsh Jagan Sathyamoorthy, Kasun Weerakoon, Tianrui Guan, Mason Russell, Damon Conover, Jason Pusey, Dinesh Manocha

Published in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2023

We propose a novel method for autonomous legged robot navigation in densely vegetated environments with a variety of pliable/traversable and non-pliable/untraversable vegetation. We present a novel few-shot learning classifier that can be trained on a few hundred RGB images to differentiate flora that can be navigated through, from the ones that must be circumvented. Using the vegetation classification and 2D lidar scans, our method constructs a vegetation-aware traversability cost map that accurately represents the pliable and non-pliable obstacles with lower, and higher traversability costs, respectively. Our cost map construction accounts for misclassifications of the vegetation and further lowers the risk of collisions, freezing and entrapment in vegetation during navigation. Furthermore, we propose holonomic recovery behaviors for the robot for scenarios where it freezes, or gets physically entrapped in dense, pliable vegetation. We demonstrate our method on a Boston Dynamics Spot robot in real-world unstructured environments with sparse and dense tall grass, bushes, trees, etc. We observe an increase of 25-90% in success rates, 10-90% decrease in freezing rate, and up to 65% decrease in the false positive rate compared to existing methods.

TNS: Terrain Traversability Mapping and Navigation System for Autonomous Excavators

Tianrui Guan, Zhenpeng He, Ruitao Song, Dinesh Manocha, Liangjun Zhang

Published in Robotics: Science and Systems, 2022

We present a terrain traversability mapping and navigation system (TNS) for autonomous excavator applications in an unstructured environment. Our system can adapt to changing environments and update the terrain information in real-time. Moreover, we present a novel dataset, the Complex Worksite Terrain (CWT) dataset, which consists of RGB images from construction sites with seven categories based on navigability. Our novel algorithms improve the mapping accuracy over previous SOTA methods by 4.17-30.48% and reduce MSE on the traversability map by 13.8-71.4%. We have combined our mapping approach with planning and control modules in an autonomous excavator navigation system and observe 49.3% improvement in the overall success rate. Based on TNS, we demonstrate the first autonomous excavator that can navigate through unstructured environments consisting of deep pits, steep hills, rock piles, and other complex terrain features.

FAR: Fourier Aerial Video Recognition

Divya Kothandaraman, Tianrui Guan, Xijun Wang, Sean Hu, Ming Lin, Dinesh Manocha

Published in European Conference on Computer Vision, 2022

We present an algorithm, Fourier Activity Recognition (FAR), for UAV video activity recognition. Our formulation uses a novel Fourier object disentanglement method to innately separate out the human agent (which is typically small) from the background. Our disentanglement technique operates in the frequency domain to characterize the extent of temporal change of spatial pixels, and exploits convolution-multiplication properties of Fourier transform to map this representation to the corresponding object-background entangled features obtained from the network. To encapsulate contextual information and long-range space-time dependencies, we present a novel Fourier Attention algorithm, which emulates the benefits of self-attention by modeling the weighted outer product in the frequency domain. Our Fourier attention formulation uses much fewer computations than self-attention. We have evaluated our approach on multiple UAV datasets including UAV Human RGB, UAV Human Night, Drone Action, and NEC Drone. We demonstrate a relative improvement of 8.02% - 38.69% in top-1 accuracy and up to 3 times faster over prior works.

M3DeTR: Multi-representation, Multi-scale, Mutual-relation 3D Object Detection with Transformers

Tianrui Guan*, Jun Wang*, Shiyi Lan, Rohan Chandra, Zuxuan Wu, Larry Davis, Dinesh Manocha

Published in Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, 2022

We present a novel architecture for 3D object detection, M3DeTR, which combines different point cloud representations (raw, voxels, bird-eye view) with different feature scales based on multi-scale feature pyramids. M3DeTR is the first approach that unifies multiple point cloud representations, feature scales, as well as models mutual relationships between point clouds simultaneously using transformers. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI 3D object detection dataset and Waymo Open Dataset.

GANav: Efficient Terrain Segmentation for Robot Navigation in Unstructured Outdoor Environments

Tianrui Guan, Divya Kothandaraman, Rohan Chandra, Adarsh Jagan Sathyamoorthy, Kasun Weerakoon, Dinesh Manocha

Published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2021

We propose GANav, a novel group-wise attention mechanism to identify safe and navigable regions in off-road terrains and unstructured environments from RGB images. Our approach classifies terrains based on their navigability levels using coarse-grained semantic segmentation. Our novel group-wise attention loss enables any backbone network to explicitly focus on the different groups features with low spatial resolution. Our design leads to efficient inference while maintaining a high level of accuracy compared to existing SOTA methods.

Forecasting Trajectory and Behavior of Road-Agents Using Spectral Clustering in Graph-LSTMs

Rohan Chandra, Tianrui Guan, Srujan Panuganti, Trisha Mittal, Uttaran Bhattacharya, Aniket Bera, Dinesh Manocha

Published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2020

We present a novel approach for traffic forecasting in urban traffic scenarios using a combination of spectral graph analysis and deep learning. We predict both the lowlevel information (future trajectories) as well as the high-level information (road-agent behavior) from the extracted trajectory of each road-agent. Our formulation represents the proximity between the road agents using a weighted dynamic geometric graph (DGG). We use a two-stream graph-LSTM network to perform traffic forecasting using these weighted DGGs. The first stream predicts the spatial coordinates of road-agents, while the second stream predicts whether a road-agent is going to exhibit overspeeding, underspeeding, or neutral behavior by modeling spatial interactions between road-agents. Additionally, we propose a new regularization algorithm based on spectral clustering to reduce the error margin in long-term prediction (3-5 seconds) and improve the accuracy of the predicted trajectories. We evaluate our approach on the Argoverse, Lyft, Apolloscape, and NGSIM datasets and highlight the benefits over prior trajectory prediction methods.

Other Publications

You can also find my articles on my Google Scholar profile. –>