Fan Ma

Tuo Feng, Wenguan Wang, Fan Ma et al.

Autonomous systems need to process large-scale, sparse, and irregular point clouds with limited compute resources. Consequently, it is essential to develop LiDAR perception methods that are both efficient and effective. Although naively enlarging 3D kernel size can enhance performance, it will also lead to a cubically-increasing overhead. Therefore, it is crucial to develop streamlined 3D large kernel designs that eliminate redundant weights and work effectively with larger kernels. In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective Large Sparse Kernel 3D Neural Network (LSK3DNet) that leverages dynamic pruning to amplify the 3D kernel size. Our method comprises two core components: Spatial-wise Dynamic Sparsity (SDS) and Channel-wise Weight Selection (CWS). SDS dynamically prunes and regrows volumetric weights from the beginning to learn a large sparse 3D kernel. It not only boosts performance but also significantly reduces model size and computational cost. Moreover, CWS selects the most important channels for 3D convolution during training and subsequently prunes the redundant channels to accelerate inference for 3D vision tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LSK3DNet on three benchmark datasets and five tracks compared with classical models and large kernel designs. Notably, LSK3DNet achieves the state-of-the-art performance on SemanticKITTI (i.e., 75.6% on single-scan and 63.4% on multi-scan), with roughly 40% model size reduction and 60% computing operations reduction compared to the naive large 3D kernel model.

Yucheng Suo, Fan Ma, Linchao Zhu et al.

Multi-modal Large language models (MLLMs) show remarkable ability in video understanding. Nevertheless, understanding long videos remains challenging as the models can only process a finite number of frames in a single inference, potentially omitting crucial visual information. To address the challenge, we propose generating multiple predictions through visual context sampling, followed by a scoring mechanism to select the final prediction. Specifically, we devise a bin-wise sampling strategy that enables MLLMs to generate diverse answers based on various combinations of keyframes, thereby enriching the visual context. To determine the final prediction from the sampled answers, we employ a self-reward by linearly combining three scores: (1) a frequency score indicating the prevalence of each option, (2) a marginal confidence score reflecting the inter-intra sample certainty of MLLM predictions, and (3) a reasoning score for different question types, including clue-guided answering for global questions and temporal self-refocusing for local questions. The frequency score ensures robustness through majority correctness, the confidence-aligned score reflects prediction certainty, and the typed-reasoning score addresses cases with sparse key visual information using tailored strategies. Experiments show that this approach covers the correct answer for a high percentage of long video questions, on seven datasets show that our method improves the performance of three MLLMs.