Greetings from Evanston.

I am currently a Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University under the supervision of Prof. Ying Wu. My research interests lies in the intersection of computer vision and robotics, with a particular emphasis on active vision (the agent is endowed with the ability to move and perceive). I am constantly investigating the challenges inherent to active vision agents in an open-world context. These challenges include, but are not limited to, continual learning, few-sample learning, and uncertainty quantification.

Prior to my Ph.D., my researches primarily focused on the perception in autonomous driving vehicles, encompassing areas such as stereo vision, 3D mapping, moving-object detection and map repair.

My detailed resume/CV is here (last updated on August 2023).

🔥 News

• 2023.07:  🎉 Our paper on uncertainty estimation has been accepted to ICCV 2023! Appreciation goes out to all advisors: Dr. Bo Liu, Dr. Haoxiang Li, Prof. Ying Wu, and Prof. Gang Hua!
• 2023.03:  🎉 I will join Amazon Robotics as an Applied Scientist Intern this summer!
• 2023.03:  🎉 I passed my Ph.D. prospectus exam! I would like to extend my gratitude to my committee: Prof. Ying Wu, Prof. Qi Zhu, and Prof. Thrasos N. Pappas.
• 2022.10:  🎉 Our paper Avoiding lingering in learning active recognition by adversarial disturbance has been accepted to WACV 2023!

📖 Educations

• 2019.09 - 2023.12 (expected), Ph.D. cadidate in Electrical Engineering, advised by Prof. Ying Wu, Northwestern University.
• 2017.09 - 2019.06, M.S. in Computer Science, advised by Prof. Long Chen, Sun Yat-sen University.
• 2013.09 - 2017.06, B.E. in Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University.

📝 Publications

ICCV 2023

Flexible Visual Recognition by Evidential Modeling of Confusion and Ignorance

Lei Fan, Bo Liu, Haoxiang Li, Ying Wu, Gang Hua

Supplementary | Poster | Project

• Modeling both confusion and ignorance with hyper-opinions.
• Proposing a hierarchical structure with binary plausible functions to handle the challenge of 2^K predictions.
• Experiments with synthetic data, flexible visual recognition, and open-set detection validate our approach.

WACV 2023

Avoiding Lingering in Learning Active Recognition by Adversarial Disturbance

Lei Fan, Ying Wu

Supplementary | Poster

• Lingering: The joint learning process could lead to unintended solutions, like a collapsed policy that only visits views that the recognizer is already sufficiently trained to obtain rewards.
• Our approach integrates another adversarial policy to disturb the recognition agent during training, forming a competing game to promote active explorations and avoid lingering.

ICCV 2021

FLAR: A Unified Prototype Framework for Few-sample Lifelong Active Recognition

Lei Fan, Peixi Xiong, Wei Wei, Ying Wu

Supplementary | Poster

• The active recognition agent needs to incrementally learn new classes with limited data during exploration.
• Our approach integrates prototypes, a robust representation for limited training samples, into a reinforcement learning solution, which motivates the agent to move towards views resulting in more discriminative features.

• Unsupervised Depth Completion and Denoising for RGB-D Sensors, Lei Fan, Yunxuan Li, Chen Jiang, Ying Wu, accepted by IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022.

• SemaSuperpixel: A Multi-channel Probability-driven Superpixel Segmentation Method, Xuehui Wang, Qingyun Zhao, Lei Fan, Yuzhi Zhao, Tiantian Wang, Qiong Yan, Long Chen, accepted by IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 2021.

• Lightweight Single-Image Super-Resolution Network with Attentive Auxiliary Feature Learning, Xuehui Wang, Qing Wang, Yuzhi Zhao, Junchi Yan, Lei Fan, and Long Chen, accepted by Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), 2020.

• Toward the Ghosting Phenomenon in a Stereo-Based Map With a Collaborative RGB-D Repair, Jiasong Zhu, Lei Fan, Wei Tian, Long Chen, Dongpu Cao, and Fei-Yue Wang, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (Tran-ITS), 2020.

• Monocular Outdoor Semantic Mapping with a Multi-task Network, Yucai Bai, Lei Fan, Ziyu Pan, and Long Chen, accepted by IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2019.

• Collaborative 3D Completion of Color and Depth in a Specified Area with Superpixels, Lei Fan, Long Chen, Chaoqiang Zhang, Wei Tian, and Dongpu Cao, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics (TIE), 2018.

• Planecell: Representing Structural Space with Plane Elements, Lei Fan, Long Chen, Kai Huang and Dongpu Cao, accepted as Best Student Paper by IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), 2018.

• A Full Density Stereo Matching System Based on the Combination of CNNs and Slanted-planes, Long Chen, Lei Fan, Jianda Chen, Dongpu Cao, and Feiyue Wang, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems (TSMCS), 2017.

• Let the Robot Tell: Describe Car Image with Natural Language via LSTM, Long Chen, Yuhang He, and Lei Fan, accepted by Pattern Recognition Letters (PRL), 2017.

• Moving-Object Detection from Consecutive Stereo Pairs using Slanted Plane Smoothing, Long Chen, Lei Fan, Guodong Xie, Kai Huang, and Andreas Nuchter, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (Tran-ITS), 2017.

• RGB-T SLAM: A Flexible SLAM Framework by Combining Appearance and Thermal Information, Long Chen, Libo Sun, Teng Yang, Lei Fan, Kai Huang, and Zhe Xuanyuan, accepted by IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2017.

💻 Internships

• 2023.06 - 2023.09, Applied Scientist Intern, Amazon Robotics, Seattle, US.
  - Topic: Surface normal estimation and stability analysis.
  - Advisors: Dr. Shantanu Thaker, Dr. Sisir Karumanchi.
• 2022.06 - 2022.09, Research Intern, Wormpex AI Research, Bellevue, US.
  - Topic: Uncertainty quantification for deep visual recognition.
  - Advisors: Dr. Bo Liu, Dr. Haoxiang Li, and Dr. Gang Hua.
• 2020.06 - 2020.09, Research Intern, Yosion Analytics, Chicago, US.
  - Topic: Autonomous forklift in a human-machine co-working environment.
• 2016.06 - 2016.09, Visual Engineer Intern, DJI, Shenzhen, China.
  - Topic: Stereo matching using the fish-eye cameras on drones.

🎖 Honors and Awards

• 2019.09 Northwestern University Murphy Fellowship.
• 2018.06 Best Student Paper, IEEE Intelligent Vehicle Symposium.
• 2019.09 National Merit Scholarship, China