Jianhua Han

Yi Zhu, Yanpeng Zhou, Chunwei Wang et al.

Currently, vision encoder models like Vision Transformers (ViTs) typically excel at image recognition tasks but cannot simultaneously support text recognition like human visual recognition. To address this limitation, we propose UNIT, a novel training framework aimed at UNifying Image and Text recognition within a single model. Starting with a vision encoder pre-trained with image recognition tasks, UNIT introduces a lightweight language decoder for predicting text outputs and a lightweight vision decoder to prevent catastrophic forgetting of the original image encoding capabilities. The training process comprises two stages: intra-scale pretraining and inter-scale finetuning. During intra-scale pretraining, UNIT learns unified representations from multi-scale inputs, where images and documents are at their commonly used resolution, to enable fundamental recognition capability. In the inter-scale finetuning stage, the model introduces scale-exchanged data, featuring images and documents at resolutions different from the most commonly used ones, to enhance its scale robustness. Notably, UNIT retains the original vision encoder architecture, making it cost-free in terms of inference and deployment. Experiments across multiple benchmarks confirm that our method significantly outperforms existing methods on document-related tasks (e.g., OCR and DocQA) while maintaining the performances on natural images, demonstrating its ability to substantially enhance text recognition without compromising its core image recognition capabilities.

Ming Nie, Renyuan Peng, Chunwei Wang et al.

Large vision-language models (VLMs) have garnered increasing interest in autonomous driving areas, due to their advanced capabilities in complex reasoning tasks essential for highly autonomous vehicle behavior. Despite their potential, research in autonomous systems is hindered by the lack of datasets with annotated reasoning chains that explain the decision-making processes in driving. To bridge this gap, we present Reason2Drive, a benchmark dataset with over 600K video-text pairs, aimed at facilitating the study of interpretable reasoning in complex driving environments. We distinctly characterize the autonomous driving process as a sequential combination of perception, prediction, and reasoning steps, and the question-answer pairs are automatically collected from a diverse range of open-source outdoor driving datasets, including nuScenes, Waymo and ONCE. Moreover, we introduce a novel aggregated evaluation metric to assess chain-based reasoning performance in autonomous systems, addressing the semantic ambiguities of existing metrics such as BLEU and CIDEr. Based on the proposed benchmark, we conduct experiments to assess various existing VLMs, revealing insights into their reasoning capabilities. Additionally, we develop an efficient approach to empower VLMs to leverage object-level perceptual elements in both feature extraction and prediction, further enhancing their reasoning accuracy. The code and dataset will be released.

Kun Xiang, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Yinya Huang et al.

The rapid advancement of embodied intelligence and world models has intensified efforts to integrate physical laws into AI systems, yet physical perception and symbolic physics reasoning have developed along separate trajectories without a unified bridging framework. This work provides a comprehensive overview of physical AI, establishing clear distinctions between theoretical physics reasoning and applied physical understanding while systematically examining how physics-grounded methods enhance AI's real-world comprehension across structured symbolic reasoning, embodied systems, and generative models. Through rigorous analysis of recent advances, we advocate for intelligent systems that ground learning in both physical principles and embodied reasoning processes, transcending pattern recognition toward genuine understanding of physical laws. Our synthesis envisions next-generation world models capable of explaining physical phenomena and predicting future states, advancing safe, generalizable, and interpretable AI systems. We maintain a continuously updated resource at https://github.com/AI4Phys/Awesome-AI-for-Physics.

Jianhua Han, Xiwen Liang, Hang Xu et al.

Aiming at facilitating a real-world, ever-evolving and scalable autonomous driving system, we present a large-scale dataset for standardizing the evaluation of different self-supervised and semi-supervised approaches by learning from raw data, which is the first and largest dataset to date. Existing autonomous driving systems heavily rely on `perfect' visual perception models (i.e., detection) trained using extensive annotated data to ensure safety. However, it is unrealistic to elaborately label instances of all scenarios and circumstances (i.e., night, extreme weather, cities) when deploying a robust autonomous driving system. Motivated by recent advances of self-supervised and semi-supervised learning, a promising direction is to learn a robust detection model by collaboratively exploiting large-scale unlabeled data and few labeled data. Existing datasets either provide only a small amount of data or covers limited domains with full annotation, hindering the exploration of large-scale pre-trained models. Here, we release a Large-Scale 2D Self/semi-supervised Object Detection dataset for Autonomous driving, named as SODA10M, containing 10 million unlabeled images and 20K images labeled with 6 representative object categories. To improve diversity, the images are collected within 27833 driving hours under different weather conditions, periods and location scenes of 32 different cities. We provide extensive experiments and deep analyses of existing popular self/semi-supervised approaches, and give some interesting findings in autonomous driving scope. Experiments show that SODA10M can serve as a promising pre-training dataset for different self-supervised learning methods, which gives superior performance when fine-tuning with different downstream tasks (i.e., detection, semantic/instance segmentation) in autonomous driving domain. More information can refer to https://soda-2d.github.io.