Zhongxue Gan

Yirui Sun, Guangyu Zhuge, Keliang Liu et al.

World Action Models (WAMs) improve robot manipulation by using video-based future representations to condition action generation. In pixel-space WAMs, however, the best action condition is not necessarily the fully denoised video. Controlled denoising-depth scans show that video refinement can reduce action error up to a state-dependent point, after which the gain may saturate or even reverse when late predictions become less action-relevant or physically unreliable. This suggests that action generation should use a state-dependent point along the video noise trajectory rather than a fixed terminal denoising depth. We introduce State-Adaptive Noise Trajectory Scheduler (SANTS), a lightweight scheduler for video-to-action diffusion policies. At each video decision point, SANTS reads the current video-state representation and noise level, then jointly predicts a cumulative stopping hazard and a relative noise-progression ratio. SANTS is post-trained with a path-level reward computed after the frozen action branch generates the final action chunk, so the scheduler is optimized for downstream action quality rather than intermediate video fidelity, while redundant video-state updates are explicitly penalized. Experiments show that SANTS reaches \(94.4\%\) overall success on RoboTwin 2.0 and \(73.1\%\) average success across seven real-robot tasks, while reducing latency by \(81.7\%\) and \(79.0\%\) relative to full video denoising, respectively. These results indicate that adaptive selection along the video noise trajectory can preserve the control benefits of WAM-style future reasoning while removing much of its redundant inference cost.

Minhao Zou, Zhongxue Gan, Yutong Wang et al.

Graph and hypergraph representation learning has attracted increasing attention from various research fields. Despite the decent performance and fruitful applications of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), Hypergraph Neural Networks (HGNNs), and their well-designed variants, on some commonly used benchmark graphs and hypergraphs, they are outperformed by even a simple Multi-Layer Perceptron. This observation motivates a reexamination of the design paradigm of the current GNNs and HGNNs and poses challenges of extracting graph features effectively. In this work, a universal feature encoder for both graph and hypergraph representation learning is designed, called UniG-Encoder. The architecture starts with a forward transformation of the topological relationships of connected nodes into edge or hyperedge features via a normalized projection matrix. The resulting edge/hyperedge features, together with the original node features, are fed into a neural network. The encoded node embeddings are then derived from the reversed transformation, described by the transpose of the projection matrix, of the network's output, which can be further used for tasks such as node classification. The proposed architecture, in contrast to the traditional spectral-based and/or message passing approaches, simultaneously and comprehensively exploits the node features and graph/hypergraph topologies in an efficient and unified manner, covering both heterophilic and homophilic graphs. The designed projection matrix, encoding the graph features, is intuitive and interpretable. Extensive experiments are conducted and demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed framework on twelve representative hypergraph datasets and six real-world graph datasets, compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Our implementation is available online at https://github.com/MinhZou/UniG-Encoder.

Yijie Zhou, Likun Cai, Xianhui Cheng et al.

In the era of big data and large models, automatic annotating functions for multi-modal data are of great significance for real-world AI-driven applications, such as autonomous driving and embodied AI. Unlike traditional closed-set annotation, open-vocabulary annotation is essential to achieve human-level cognition capability. However, there are few open-vocabulary auto-labeling systems for multi-modal 3D data. In this paper, we introduce OpenAnnotate3D, an open-source open-vocabulary auto-labeling system that can automatically generate 2D masks, 3D masks, and 3D bounding box annotations for vision and point cloud data. Our system integrates the chain-of-thought capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the cross-modality capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs). To the best of our knowledge, OpenAnnotate3D is one of the pioneering works for open-vocabulary multi-modal 3D auto-labeling. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on both public and in-house real-world datasets, which demonstrate that the system significantly improves annotation efficiency compared to manual annotation while providing accurate open-vocabulary auto-annotating results.

Yan Wang, Shaoqi Yan, Yang Liu et al.

Facial expression recognition (FER) aims to analyze emotional states from static images and dynamic sequences, which is pivotal in enhancing anthropomorphic communication among humans, robots, and digital avatars by leveraging AI technologies. As the FER field evolves from controlled laboratory environments to more complex in-the-wild scenarios, advanced methods have been rapidly developed and new challenges and apporaches are encounted, which are not well addressed in existing reviews of FER. This paper offers a comprehensive survey of both image-based static FER (SFER) and video-based dynamic FER (DFER) methods, analyzing from model-oriented development to challenge-focused categorization. We begin with a critical comparison of recent reviews, an introduction to common datasets and evaluation criteria, and an in-depth workflow on FER to establish a robust research foundation. We then systematically review representative approaches addressing eight main challenges in SFER (such as expression disturbance, uncertainties, compound emotions, and cross-domain inconsistency) as well as seven main challenges in DFER (such as key frame sampling, expression intensity variations, and cross-modal alignment). Additionally, we analyze recent advancements, benchmark performances, major applications, and ethical considerations. Finally, we propose five promising future directions and development trends to guide ongoing research. The project page for this paper can be found at https://github.com/wangyanckxx/SurveyFER.

Siao Liu, Zhaoyu Chen, Yang Liu et al.

Learning a policy with great generalization to unseen environments remains challenging but critical in visual reinforcement learning. Despite the success of augmentation combination in the supervised learning generalization, naively applying it to visual RL algorithms may damage the training efficiency, suffering from serve performance degradation. In this paper, we first conduct qualitative analysis and illuminate the main causes: (i) high-variance gradient magnitudes and (ii) gradient conflicts existed in various augmentation methods. To alleviate these issues, we propose a general policy gradient optimization framework, named Conflict-aware Gradient Agreement Augmentation (CG2A), and better integrate augmentation combination into visual RL algorithms to address the generalization bias. In particular, CG2A develops a Gradient Agreement Solver to adaptively balance the varying gradient magnitudes, and introduces a Soft Gradient Surgery strategy to alleviate the gradient conflicts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CG2A significantly improves the generalization performance and sample efficiency of visual RL algorithms.

Yuanqiang Zhou, Dewei Li, Yugeng Xi et al.

For the application of MPC design in on-line regulation or tracking control problems, several studies have attempted to develop an accurate model, and realize adequate uncertainty description of linear or non-linear plants of the processes. In this study, we employ the data-driven learning technique to iteratively approximate the dynamical parameters, without requiring a priori knowledge of system matrices. The proposed MPC approach can predict and optimize the future behaviors using multiorder derivatives of control input as decision variables. Because the proposed algorithm can obtain a linear system model at each sampling, it can adapt to the actual dynamics of time-varying or nonlinear plants. This methodology can serve as a data-driven identification tool to study adaptive optimal control problems for unknown complex systems.

Siao Liu, Zhaoyu Chen, Wei Li et al.

Recently, adversarial attacks have been applied in visual object tracking to deceive deep trackers by injecting imperceptible perturbations into video frames. However, previous work only generates the video-specific perturbations, which restricts its application scenarios. In addition, existing attacks are difficult to implement in reality due to the real-time of tracking and the re-initialization mechanism. To address these issues, we propose an offline universal adversarial attack called Efficient Universal Shuffle Attack. It takes only one perturbation to cause the tracker malfunction on all videos. To improve the computational efficiency and attack performance, we propose a greedy gradient strategy and a triple loss to efficiently capture and attack model-specific feature representations through the gradients. Experimental results show that EUSA can significantly reduce the performance of state-of-the-art trackers on OTB2015 and VOT2018.

Julong Wei, Shanshuai Yuan, Pengfei Li et al.

The rise of multi-modal large language models(MLLMs) has spurred their applications in autonomous driving. Recent MLLM-based methods perform action by learning a direct mapping from perception to action, neglecting the dynamics of the world and the relations between action and world dynamics. In contrast, human beings possess world model that enables them to simulate the future states based on 3D internal visual representation and plan actions accordingly. To this end, we propose OccLLaMA, an occupancy-language-action generative world model, which uses semantic occupancy as a general visual representation and unifies vision-language-action(VLA) modalities through an autoregressive model. Specifically, we introduce a novel VQVAE-like scene tokenizer to efficiently discretize and reconstruct semantic occupancy scenes, considering its sparsity and classes imbalance. Then, we build a unified multi-modal vocabulary for vision, language and action. Furthermore, we enhance LLM, specifically LLaMA, to perform the next token/scene prediction on the unified vocabulary to complete multiple tasks in autonomous driving. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OccLLaMA achieves competitive performance across multiple tasks, including 4D occupancy forecasting, motion planning, and visual question answering, showcasing its potential as a foundation model in autonomous driving.

Chunlei Meng, Jiabin Luo, Pengbin Feng et al.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) requires integrating language, acoustic, and visual signals without sacrificing modality-specific sentiment evidence. Existing methods mainly improve either shared-private decomposition or cross-modal interaction. Although effective, both ultimately depend on how shared and modality-specific evidence is organized before prediction. We observe that, under standard shared-private pipelines, modality heterogeneity often induces a branch-imbalance process: dominant shared patterns accumulate in the shared branch, yielding redundant and modality-biased evidence, while repeated interaction and rigid alignment gradually leak shared information into modality-specific channels and weaken discriminative private representations. As a result, the complementarity between shared and private representations is reduced, limiting robust sentiment reasoning. To address this issue, we propose the Dual-Branch Rebalancing Framework (DBR) on top of a standard multimodal decoupling stage. In the shared branch, a Temporal-Structural Factorization (TSF) module disentangles temporal evolution from structural dependencies and adaptively integrates them to reduce shared redundancy. In the private branch, an Anchor-Guided Private Routing (AGPR) module preserves discriminative modality-specific patterns while allowing controlled cross-modal borrowing. A Bidirectional Rebalancing Fusion (BRF) module then reunifies the two regularized branches in a context-aware manner for final prediction. Extensive experiments on CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI, and MIntRec demonstrate that DBR consistently outperforms the compared baselines. Further analyses show that these improvements come from coordinated mitigation of branch imbalance.

Huaxiang Zhang, Kai Liu, Zhongxue Gan et al.

Unmanned aerial vehicle object detection (UAV-OD) has been widely used in various scenarios. However, most existing UAV-OD algorithms rely on manually designed components, which require extensive tuning. End-to-end models that do not depend on such manually designed components are mainly designed for natural images, which are less effective for UAV imagery. To address such challenges, this paper proposes an efficient detection transformer (DETR) framework tailored for UAV imagery, i.e., UAV-DETR. The framework includes a multi-scale feature fusion with frequency enhancement module, which captures both spatial and frequency information at different scales. In addition, a frequency-focused down-sampling module is presented to retain critical spatial details during down-sampling. A semantic alignment and calibration module is developed to align and fuse features from different fusion paths. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our approach across various UAV imagery datasets. On the VisDrone dataset, our method improves AP by 3.1\% and $\text{AP}_{50}$ by 4.2\% over the baseline. Similar enhancements are observed on the UAVVaste dataset. The project page: https://github.com/ValiantDiligent/UAV-DETR

Jie Jia, Yaofeng Su, Zeyu Bao et al.

Occlusion-aware prediction remains a critical challenge in autonomous driving due to the inherent uncertainty of unobserved regions. Existing approaches either overestimate risk based on reachable states or struggle to predict accurate trajectories under high occlusion uncertainty. To address these limitations, we propose a unified risk map modeling and learning framework for partially observable environments. Our method integrates traffic flow risk and collision risk through spatiotemporal modeling, enabling fine-grained assessment of occlusion-induced hazards. To address the scarcity of scenarios involving occluded interactions, we introduce a diffusion-based scenario generation framework that produces realistic yet adversarial scenarios. We integrate the modeling and learning of a unified risk map into a framework that supports risk-aware planning under partial observability. Experiments on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art occlusion-aware baseline, improving minimum time-to-collision by 0.78 times and average time-to-collision by 1.67 times. The proposed framework offers a comprehensive and practical solution for risk-aware planning in partially observable environments.

Zhihua Hua, Junli Wang, Pengfei LI et al.

Global navigation information and local scene understanding are two crucial components of autonomous driving systems. However, our experimental results indicate that many end-to-end autonomous driving systems tend to over-rely on local scene understanding while failing to utilize global navigation information. These systems exhibit weak correlation between their planning capabilities and navigation input, and struggle to perform navigation-following in complex scenarios. To overcome this limitation, we propose the Sequential Navigation Guidance (SNG) framework, an efficient representation of global navigation information based on real-world navigation patterns. The SNG encompasses both navigation paths for constraining long-term trajectories and turn-by-turn (TBT) information for real-time decision-making logic. We constructed the SNG-QA dataset, a visual question answering (VQA) dataset based on SNG that aligns global and local planning. Additionally, we introduce an efficient model SNG-VLA that fuses local planning with global planning. The SNG-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance through precise navigation information modeling without requiring auxiliary loss functions from perception tasks. Project page: SNG-VLA

Tian Niu, Kaizhao Zhang, Zhongxue Gan et al.

Planning safe trajectories for autonomous vehicles is essential for operational safety but remains extremely challenging due to the complex interactions among traffic participants. Recent autonomous driving frameworks have focused on improving prediction accuracy to explicitly model these interactions. However, some methods overlook the significant influence of the ego vehicle's planning on the possible trajectories of other agents, which can alter prediction accuracy and lead to unsafe planning decisions. In this paper, we propose a novel motion Planning approach by Simulation with learning-based parallel scenario prediction (PS). PS deduces predictions iteratively based on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), jointly inferring scenarios that cooperate with the ego vehicle's planning set. Our method simulates possible scenes and calculates their costs after the ego vehicle executes potential actions. To balance and prune unreasonable actions and scenarios, we adopt MCTS as the foundation to explore possible future interactions encoded within the prediction network. Moreover, the query-centric trajectory prediction streamlines our scene generation, enabling a sophisticated framework that captures the mutual influence between other agents' predictions and the ego vehicle's planning. We evaluate our framework on the Argoverse 2 dataset, and the results demonstrate that our approach effectively achieves parallel ego vehicle planning.

Huaxiang Zhang, Hao Zhang, Aoran Mei et al.

Detection Transformer-based methods have achieved significant advancements in general object detection. However, challenges remain in effectively detecting small objects. One key difficulty is that existing encoders struggle to efficiently fuse low-level features. Additionally, the query selection strategies are not effectively tailored for small objects. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an efficient model, Small Object Detection Transformer (SO-DETR). The model comprises three key components: a dual-domain hybrid encoder, an enhanced query selection mechanism, and a knowledge distillation strategy. The dual-domain hybrid encoder integrates spatial and frequency domains to fuse multi-scale features effectively. This approach enhances the representation of high-resolution features while maintaining relatively low computational overhead. The enhanced query selection mechanism optimizes query initialization by dynamically selecting high-scoring anchor boxes using expanded IoU, thereby improving the allocation of query resources. Furthermore, by incorporating a lightweight backbone network and implementing a knowledge distillation strategy, we develop an efficient detector for small objects. Experimental results on the VisDrone-2019-DET and UAVVaste datasets demonstrate that SO-DETR outperforms existing methods with similar computational demands. The project page is available at https://github.com/ValiantDiligent/SO_DETR.

Chunlei Meng, Jiabin Luo, Zhenglin Yan et al.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) integrates language, visual, and acoustic modalities to infer human sentiment. Most existing methods either focus on globally shared representations or modality-specific features, while overlooking signals that are shared only by certain modality pairs. This limits the expressiveness and discriminative power of multimodal representations. To address this limitation, we propose a Tri-Subspace Disentanglement (TSD) framework that explicitly factorizes features into three complementary subspaces: a common subspace capturing global consistency, submodally-shared subspaces modeling pairwise cross-modal synergies, and private subspaces preserving modality-specific cues. To keep these subspaces pure and independent, we introduce a decoupling supervisor together with structured regularization losses. We further design a Subspace-Aware Cross-Attention (SACA) fusion module that adaptively models and integrates information from the three subspaces to obtain richer and more robust representations. Experiments on CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI demonstrate that TSD achieves state-of-the-art performance across all key metrics, reaching 0.691 MAE on CMU-MOSI and 54.9% ACC-7 on CMU-MOSEI, and also transfers well to multimodal intent recognition tasks. Ablation studies confirm that tri-subspace disentanglement and SACA jointly enhance the modeling of multi-granular cross-modal sentiment cues.

Chunlei Meng, Ziyang Zhou, Lucas He et al.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis integrates Linguistic, Visual, and Acoustic. Mainstream approaches based on modality-invariant and modality-specific factorization or on complex fusion still rely on spatiotemporal mixed modeling. This ignores spatiotemporal heterogeneity, leading to spatiotemporal information asymmetry and thus limited performance. Hence, we propose TSDA, Temporal-Spatial Decouple before Act, which explicitly decouples each modality into temporal dynamics and spatial structural context before any interaction. For every modality, a temporal encoder and a spatial encoder project signals into separate temporal and spatial body. Factor-Consistent Cross-Modal Alignment then aligns temporal features only with their temporal counterparts across modalities, and spatial features only with their spatial counterparts. Factor specific supervision and decorrelation regularization reduce cross factor leakage while preserving complementarity. A Gated Recouple module subsequently recouples the aligned streams for task. Extensive experiments show that TSDA outperforms baselines. Ablation analysis studies confirm the necessity and interpretability of the design.

Chunlei Meng, Guanhong Huang, Rong Fu et al.

Multimodal learning aims to capture both shared and private information from multiple modalities. However, existing methods that project all modalities into a single latent space for fusion often overlook the asynchronous, multi-level semantic structure of multimodal data. This oversight induces semantic misalignment and error propagation, thereby degrading representation quality. To address this issue, we propose Cross-Level Co-Representation (CLCR), which explicitly organizes each modality's features into a three-level semantic hierarchy and specifies level-wise constraints for cross-modal interactions. First, a semantic hierarchy encoder aligns shallow, mid, and deep features across modalities, establishing a common basis for interaction. And then, at each level, an Intra-Level Co-Exchange Domain (IntraCED) factorizes features into shared and private subspaces and restricts cross-modal attention to the shared subspace via a learnable token budget. This design ensures that only shared semantics are exchanged and prevents leakage from private channels. To integrate information across levels, the Inter-Level Co-Aggregation Domain (InterCAD) synchronizes semantic scales using learned anchors, selectively fuses the shared representations, and gates private cues to form a compact task representation. We further introduce regularization terms to enforce separation of shared and private features and to minimize cross-level interference. Experiments on six benchmarks spanning emotion recognition, event localization, sentiment analysis, and action recognition show that CLCR achieves strong performance and generalizes well across tasks.

Yi Liu, Hongda Zhang, Zhongxue Gan et al.

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a prominent swarm intelligence algorithm extensively applied to path planning. However, traditional ACO methods often exhibit shortcomings, such as blind search behavior and slow convergence within complex environments. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the Pheromone-Focused Ant Colony Optimization (PFACO) algorithm, which introduces three key strategies to enhance the problem-solving ability of the ant colony. First, the initial pheromone distribution is concentrated in more promising regions based on the Euclidean distances of nodes to the start and end points, balancing the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Second, promising solutions are reinforced during colony iterations to intensify pheromone deposition along high-quality paths, accelerating convergence while maintaining solution diversity. Third, a forward-looking mechanism is implemented to penalize redundant path turns, promoting smoother and more efficient solutions. These strategies collectively produce the focused pheromones to guide the ant colony's search, which enhances the global optimization capabilities of the PFACO algorithm, significantly improving convergence speed and solution quality across diverse optimization problems. The experimental results demonstrate that PFACO consistently outperforms comparative ACO algorithms in terms of convergence speed and solution quality.

Bowen Liu, Chunlei Meng, Wei Lin et al.

Accurate vascular segmentation is essential for coronary visualization and the diagnosis of coronary heart disease. This task involves the extraction of sparse tree-like vascular branches from the volumetric space. However, existing methods have faced significant challenges due to discontinuous vascular segmentation and missing endpoints. To address this issue, a 3D vision graph neural network framework, named ViG3D-UNet, was introduced. This method integrates 3D graph representation and aggregation within a U-shaped architecture to facilitate continuous vascular segmentation. The ViG3D module captures volumetric vascular connectivity and topology, while the convolutional module extracts fine vascular details. These two branches are combined through channel attention to form the encoder feature. Subsequently, a paperclip-shaped offset decoder minimizes redundant computations in the sparse feature space and restores the feature map size to match the original input dimensions. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for continuous vascular segmentation, evaluations were performed on two public datasets, ASOCA and ImageCAS. The segmentation results show that the ViG3D-UNet surpassed competing methods in maintaining vascular segmentation connectivity while achieving high segmentation accuracy. Our code will be available soon.

Chunlei Meng, Pengbin Feng, Rong Fu et al.

Centralized multimodal learning commonly compresses language, acoustic, and visual signals into a single fused representation for prediction. While effective, this paradigm suffers from two limitations: modality dominance, where optimization gravitates towards the path of least resistance, ignoring weaker but informative modalities, and spurious modality coupling, where models overfit to incidental cross-modal correlations. To address these, we propose Group Cognition Learning (GCL), a governed collaboration paradigm that applies a two-stage protocol after modality-specific encoding. In Stage 1 (Selective Interaction), a Routing Agent proposes directed interaction routes, and an Auditing Agent assigns sample-wise gates to emphasize exchanges that yield positive marginal predictive gain while suppressing redundant coupling. In Stage 2 (Consensus Formation), a Public-Factor Agent maintains an explicit shared factor, and an Aggregation Agent produces the final prediction through contribution-aware weighting while keeping each modality representation as a specialization channel. Extensive experiments on CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI, and MIntRec demonstrate that GCL mitigates dominance and coupling, establishing state-of-the-art results across both regression and classification benchmarks. Analysis experiments further demonstrate the effectiveness of the design.

Ke Wu, Kaizhao Zhang, Zhiwei Zhang et al.

Online dense mapping of urban scenes forms a fundamental cornerstone for scene understanding and navigation of autonomous vehicles. Recent advancements in mapping methods are mainly based on NeRF, whose rendering speed is too slow to meet online requirements. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), with its rendering speed hundreds of times faster than NeRF, holds greater potential in online dense mapping. However, integrating 3DGS into a street-view dense mapping framework still faces two challenges, including incomplete reconstruction due to the absence of geometric information beyond the LiDAR coverage area and extensive computation for reconstruction in large urban scenes. To this end, we propose HGS-Mapping, an online dense mapping framework in unbounded large-scale scenes. To attain complete construction, our framework introduces Hybrid Gaussian Representation, which models different parts of the entire scene using Gaussians with distinct properties. Furthermore, we employ a hybrid Gaussian initialization mechanism and an adaptive update method to achieve high-fidelity and rapid reconstruction. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to integrate Gaussian representation into online dense mapping of urban scenes. Our approach achieves SOTA reconstruction accuracy while only employing 66% number of Gaussians, leading to 20% faster reconstruction speed.

Aoran Mei, Jianhua Wang, Guo-Niu Zhu et al.

With their prominent scene understanding and reasoning capabilities, pre-trained visual-language models (VLMs) such as GPT-4V have attracted increasing attention in robotic task planning. Compared with traditional task planning strategies, VLMs are strong in multimodal information parsing and code generation and show remarkable efficiency. Although VLMs demonstrate great potential in robotic task planning, they suffer from challenges like hallucination, semantic complexity, and limited context. To handle such issues, this paper proposes a multi-agent framework, i.e., GameVLM, to enhance the decision-making process in robotic task planning. In this study, VLM-based decision and expert agents are presented to conduct the task planning. Specifically, decision agents are used to plan the task, and the expert agent is employed to evaluate these task plans. Zero-sum game theory is introduced to resolve inconsistencies among different agents and determine the optimal solution. Experimental results on real robots demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework, with an average success rate of 83.3%.

Muer Tie, Julong Wei, Zhengjun Wang et al.

Online construction of open-ended language scenes is crucial for robotic applications, where open-vocabulary interactive scene understanding is required. Recently, neural implicit representation has provided a promising direction for online interactive mapping. However, implementing open-vocabulary scene understanding capability into online neural implicit mapping still faces three challenges: lack of local scene updating ability, blurry spatial hierarchical semantic segmentation and difficulty in maintaining multi-view consistency. To this end, we proposed O2V-mapping, which utilizes voxel-based language and geometric features to create an open-vocabulary field, thus allowing for local updates during online training process. Additionally, we leverage a foundational model for image segmentation to extract language features on object-level entities, achieving clear segmentation boundaries and hierarchical semantic features. For the purpose of preserving consistency in 3D object properties across different viewpoints, we propose a spatial adaptive voxel adjustment mechanism and a multi-view weight selection method. Extensive experiments on open-vocabulary object localization and semantic segmentation demonstrate that O2V-mapping achieves online construction of language scenes while enhancing accuracy, outperforming the previous SOTA method.

Ke Wu, Zicheng Zhang, Muer Tie et al.

VINGS-Mono is a monocular (inertial) Gaussian Splatting (GS) SLAM framework designed for large scenes. The framework comprises four main components: VIO Front End, 2D Gaussian Map, NVS Loop Closure, and Dynamic Eraser. In the VIO Front End, RGB frames are processed through dense bundle adjustment and uncertainty estimation to extract scene geometry and poses. Based on this output, the mapping module incrementally constructs and maintains a 2D Gaussian map. Key components of the 2D Gaussian Map include a Sample-based Rasterizer, Score Manager, and Pose Refinement, which collectively improve mapping speed and localization accuracy. This enables the SLAM system to handle large-scale urban environments with up to 50 million Gaussian ellipsoids. To ensure global consistency in large-scale scenes, we design a Loop Closure module, which innovatively leverages the Novel View Synthesis (NVS) capabilities of Gaussian Splatting for loop closure detection and correction of the Gaussian map. Additionally, we propose a Dynamic Eraser to address the inevitable presence of dynamic objects in real-world outdoor scenes. Extensive evaluations in indoor and outdoor environments demonstrate that our approach achieves localization performance on par with Visual-Inertial Odometry while surpassing recent GS/NeRF SLAM methods. It also significantly outperforms all existing methods in terms of mapping and rendering quality. Furthermore, we developed a mobile app and verified that our framework can generate high-quality Gaussian maps in real time using only a smartphone camera and a low-frequency IMU sensor. To the best of our knowledge, VINGS-Mono is the first monocular Gaussian SLAM method capable of operating in outdoor environments and supporting kilometer-scale large scenes.

Chunlei Meng, Jiacheng Yang, Wei Lin et al.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs) have become essential in computer vision for local and global feature extraction. However, aggregating these architectures in existing methods often results in inefficiencies. To address this, the CNN-Transformer Aggregation Network (CTA-Net) was developed. CTA-Net combines CNNs and ViTs, with transformers capturing long-range dependencies and CNNs extracting localized features. This integration enables efficient processing of detailed local and broader contextual information. CTA-Net introduces the Light Weight Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Multi-Head Self-Attention (LMF-MHSA) module for effective multi-scale feature integration with reduced parameters. Additionally, the Reverse Reconstruction CNN-Variants (RRCV) module enhances the embedding of CNNs within the transformer architecture. Extensive experiments on small-scale datasets with fewer than 100,000 samples show that CTA-Net achieves superior performance (TOP-1 Acc 86.76\%), fewer parameters (20.32M), and greater efficiency (FLOPs 2.83B), making it a highly efficient and lightweight solution for visual tasks on small-scale datasets (fewer than 100,000).

Shanshuai Yuan, Julong Wei, Muer Tie et al.

Vision-based 3D semantic occupancy prediction is critical for autonomous driving, enabling unified modeling of static infrastructure and dynamic agents. In practice, autonomous vehicles may repeatedly traverse identical geographic locations under varying environmental conditions, such as weather fluctuations and illumination changes. Existing methods in 3D occupancy prediction predominantly integrate adjacent temporal contexts. However, these works neglect to leverage perceptual information, which is acquired from historical traversals of identical geographic locations. In this paper, we propose Longterm Memory Prior Occupancy (LMPOcc), the first 3D occupancy prediction methodology that exploits long-term memory priors derived from historical traversal perceptual outputs. We introduce a plug-and-play architecture that integrates long-term memory priors to enhance local perception while simultaneously constructing global occupancy representations. To adaptively aggregate prior features and current features, we develop an efficient lightweight Current-Prior Fusion module. Moreover, we propose a model-agnostic prior format to ensure compatibility across diverse occupancy prediction baselines. LMPOcc achieves state-of-the-art performance validated on the Occ3D-nuScenes benchmark, especially on static semantic categories. Additionally, experimental results demonstrate LMPOcc's ability to construct global occupancy through multi-vehicle crowdsourcing.

Chong Yu, Tao Chen, Zhongxue Gan

Adversarial attack is commonly regarded as a huge threat to neural networks because of misleading behavior. This paper presents an opposite perspective: adversarial attacks can be harnessed to improve neural models if amended correctly. Unlike traditional adversarial defense or adversarial training schemes that aim to improve the adversarial robustness, the proposed adversarial amendment (AdvAmd) method aims to improve the original accuracy level of neural models on benign samples. We thoroughly analyze the distribution mismatch between the benign and adversarial samples. This distribution mismatch and the mutual learning mechanism with the same learning ratio applied in prior art defense strategies is the main cause leading the accuracy degradation for benign samples. The proposed AdvAmd is demonstrated to steadily heal the accuracy degradation and even leads to a certain accuracy boost of common neural models on benign classification, object detection, and segmentation tasks. The efficacy of the AdvAmd is contributed by three key components: mediate samples (to reduce the influence of distribution mismatch with a fine-grained amendment), auxiliary batch norm (to solve the mutual learning mechanism and the smoother judgment surface), and AdvAmd loss (to adjust the learning ratios according to different attack vulnerabilities) through quantitative and ablation experiments.

Chong Yu, Tao Chen, Zhongxue Gan et al.

The transformer extends its success from the language to the vision domain. Because of the stacked self-attention and cross-attention blocks, the acceleration deployment of vision transformer on GPU hardware is challenging and also rarely studied. This paper thoroughly designs a compression scheme to maximally utilize the GPU-friendly 2:4 fine-grained structured sparsity and quantization. Specially, an original large model with dense weight parameters is first pruned into a sparse one by 2:4 structured pruning, which considers the GPU's acceleration of 2:4 structured sparse pattern with FP16 data type, then the floating-point sparse model is further quantized into a fixed-point one by sparse-distillation-aware quantization aware training, which considers GPU can provide an extra speedup of 2:4 sparse calculation with integer tensors. A mixed-strategy knowledge distillation is used during the pruning and quantization process. The proposed compression scheme is flexible to support supervised and unsupervised learning styles. Experiment results show GPUSQ-ViT scheme achieves state-of-the-art compression by reducing vision transformer models 6.4-12.7 times on model size and 30.3-62 times on FLOPs with negligible accuracy degradation on ImageNet classification, COCO detection and ADE20K segmentation benchmarking tasks. Moreover, GPUSQ-ViT can boost actual deployment performance by 1.39-1.79 times and 3.22-3.43 times of latency and throughput on A100 GPU, and 1.57-1.69 times and 2.11-2.51 times improvement of latency and throughput on AGX Orin.

Wenchao Ding, Jieru Zhao, Yubin Chu et al.

There is extensive literature on perceiving road structures by fusing various sensor inputs such as lidar point clouds and camera images using deep neural nets. Leveraging the latest advance of neural architects (such as transformers) and bird-eye-view (BEV) representation, the road cognition accuracy keeps improving. However, how to cognize the ``road'' for automated vehicles where there is no well-defined ``roads'' remains an open problem. For example, how to find paths inside intersections without HD maps is hard since there is neither an explicit definition for ``roads'' nor explicit features such as lane markings. The idea of this paper comes from a proverb: it becomes a way when people walk on it. Although there are no ``roads'' from sensor readings, there are ``roads'' from tracks of other vehicles. In this paper, we propose FlowMap, a path generation framework for automated vehicles based on traffic flows. FlowMap is built by extending our previous work RoadMap, a light-weight semantic map, with an additional traffic flow layer. A path generation algorithm on traffic flow fields (TFFs) is proposed to generate human-like paths. The proposed framework is validated using real-world driving data and is amenable to generating paths for super complicated intersections without using HD maps.