Ren Liu

Zilin Wang, Sangwoo Mo, Stella X. Yu et al.

Adaptive categorization of visual scenes is essential for AI agents to handle changing tasks. Unlike fixed common categories for plants or animals, ad-hoc categories are created dynamically to serve specific goals. We study open ad-hoc categorization: Given a few labeled exemplars and abundant unlabeled data, the goal is to discover the underlying context and to expand ad-hoc categories through semantic extension and visual clustering around it. Building on the insight that ad-hoc and common categories rely on similar perceptual mechanisms, we propose OAK, a simple model that introduces a small set of learnable context tokens at the input of a frozen CLIP and optimizes with both CLIP's image-text alignment objective and GCD's visual clustering objective. On Stanford and Clevr-4 datasets, OAK achieves state-of-the-art in accuracy and concept discovery across multiple categorizations, including 87.4% novel accuracy on Stanford Mood, surpassing CLIP and GCD by over 50%. Moreover, OAK produces interpretable saliency maps, focusing on hands for Action, faces for Mood, and backgrounds for Location, promoting transparency and trust while enabling adaptive and generalizable categorization.

Junjie Ye, David Paz, Hengyuan Zhang et al.

Topology reasoning is crucial for autonomous driving as it enables comprehensive understanding of connectivity and relationships between lanes and traffic elements. While recent approaches have shown success in perceiving driving topology using vehicle-mounted sensors, their scalability is hindered by the reliance on training data captured by consistent sensor configurations. We identify that the key factor in scalable lane perception and topology reasoning is the elimination of this sensor-dependent feature. To address this, we propose SMART, a scalable solution that leverages easily available standard-definition (SD) and satellite maps to learn a map prior model, supervised by large-scale geo-referenced high-definition (HD) maps independent of sensor settings. Attributed to scaled training, SMART alone achieves superior offline lane topology understanding using only SD and satellite inputs. Extensive experiments further demonstrate that SMART can be seamlessly integrated into any online topology reasoning methods, yielding significant improvements of up to 28% on the OpenLane-V2 benchmark.

Xinyuan Yan, Xiwei Xuan, Jorge Piazentin Ono et al.

Real-world machine learning models require rigorous evaluation before deployment, especially in safety-critical domains like autonomous driving and surveillance. The evaluation of machine learning models often focuses on data slices, which are subsets of the data that share a set of characteristics. Data slice finding automatically identifies conditions or data subgroups where models underperform, aiding developers in mitigating performance issues. Despite its popularity and effectiveness, data slicing for vision model validation faces several challenges. First, data slicing often needs additional image metadata or visual concepts, and falls short in certain computer vision tasks, such as object detection. Second, understanding data slices is a labor-intensive and mentally demanding process that heavily relies on the expert's domain knowledge. Third, data slicing lacks a human-in-the-loop solution that allows experts to form hypothesis and test them interactively. To overcome these limitations and better support the machine learning operations lifecycle, we introduce VISLIX, a novel visual analytics framework that employs state-of-the-art foundation models to help domain experts analyze slices in computer vision models. Our approach does not require image metadata or visual concepts, automatically generates natural language insights, and allows users to test data slice hypothesis interactively. We evaluate VISLIX with an expert study and three use cases, that demonstrate the effectiveness of our tool in providing comprehensive insights for validating object detection models.

Saimouli Katragadda, Cho-Ying Wu, Yuliang Guo et al.

To enable AI agents to interact seamlessly with both humans and 3D environments, they must not only perceive the 3D world accurately but also align human language with 3D spatial representations. While prior work has made significant progress by integrating language features into geometrically detailed 3D scene representations using 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS), these approaches rely on computationally intensive offline preprocessing of language features for each input image, limiting adaptability to new environments. In this work, we introduce Online Language Splatting, the first framework to achieve online, near real-time, open-vocabulary language mapping within a 3DGS-SLAM system without requiring pre-generated language features. The key challenge lies in efficiently fusing high-dimensional language features into 3D representations while balancing the computation speed, memory usage, rendering quality and open-vocabulary capability. To this end, we innovatively design: (1) a high-resolution CLIP embedding module capable of generating detailed language feature maps in 18ms per frame, (2) a two-stage online auto-encoder that compresses 768-dimensional CLIP features to 15 dimensions while preserving open-vocabulary capabilities, and (3) a color-language disentangled optimization approach to improve rendering quality. Experimental results show that our online method not only surpasses the state-of-the-art offline methods in accuracy but also achieves more than 40x efficiency boost, demonstrating the potential for dynamic and interactive AI applications.