Guoqing Wang

Jilai Zheng, Pin Tang, Zhongdao Wang et al.

Perceiving the world as 3D occupancy supports embodied agents to avoid collision with any types of obstacle. While open-vocabulary image understanding has prospered recently, how to bind the predicted 3D occupancy grids with open-world semantics still remains under-explored due to limited open-world annotations. Hence, instead of building our model from scratch, we try to blend 2D foundation models, specifically a depth model MiDaS and a semantic model CLIP, to lift the semantics to 3D space, thus fulfilling 3D occupancy. However, building upon these foundation models is not trivial. First, the MiDaS faces the depth ambiguity problem, i.e., it only produces relative depth but fails to estimate bin depth for feature lifting. Second, the CLIP image features lack high-resolution pixel-level information, which limits the 3D occupancy accuracy. Third, open vocabulary is often trapped by the long-tail problem. To address these issues, we propose VEON for Vocabulary-Enhanced Occupancy predictioN by not only assembling but also adapting these foundation models. We first equip MiDaS with a Zoedepth head and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) for relative-metric-bin depth transformation while reserving beneficial depth prior. Then, a lightweight side adaptor network is attached to the CLIP vision encoder to generate high-resolution features for fine-grained 3D occupancy prediction. Moreover, we design a class reweighting strategy to give priority to the tail classes. With only 46M trainable parameters and zero manual semantic labels, VEON achieves 15.14 mIoU on Occ3D-nuScenes, and shows the capability of recognizing objects with open-vocabulary categories, meaning that our VEON is label-efficient, parameter-efficient, and precise enough.

Pin Tang, Zhongdao Wang, Guoqing Wang et al.

Vision-based perception for autonomous driving requires an explicit modeling of a 3D space, where 2D latent representations are mapped and subsequent 3D operators are applied. However, operating on dense latent spaces introduces a cubic time and space complexity, which limits scalability in terms of perception range or spatial resolution. Existing approaches compress the dense representation using projections like Bird's Eye View (BEV) or Tri-Perspective View (TPV). Although efficient, these projections result in information loss, especially for tasks like semantic occupancy prediction. To address this, we propose SparseOcc, an efficient occupancy network inspired by sparse point cloud processing. It utilizes a lossless sparse latent representation with three key innovations. Firstly, a 3D sparse diffuser performs latent completion using spatially decomposed 3D sparse convolutional kernels. Secondly, a feature pyramid and sparse interpolation enhance scales with information from others. Finally, the transformer head is redesigned as a sparse variant. SparseOcc achieves a remarkable 74.9% reduction on FLOPs over the dense baseline. Interestingly, it also improves accuracy, from 12.8% to 14.1% mIOU, which in part can be attributed to the sparse representation's ability to avoid hallucinations on empty voxels.

Guoqing Wang, Zhongdao Wang, Pin Tang et al.

Existing solutions for 3D semantic occupancy prediction typically treat the task as a one-shot 3D voxel-wise segmentation perception problem. These discriminative methods focus on learning the mapping between the inputs and occupancy map in a single step, lacking the ability to gradually refine the occupancy map and the reasonable scene imaginative capacity to complete the local regions somewhere. In this paper, we introduce OccGen, a simple yet powerful generative perception model for the task of 3D semantic occupancy prediction. OccGen adopts a ''noise-to-occupancy'' generative paradigm, progressively inferring and refining the occupancy map by predicting and eliminating noise originating from a random Gaussian distribution. OccGen consists of two main components: a conditional encoder that is capable of processing multi-modal inputs, and a progressive refinement decoder that applies diffusion denoising using the multi-modal features as conditions. A key insight of this generative pipeline is that the diffusion denoising process is naturally able to model the coarse-to-fine refinement of the dense 3D occupancy map, therefore producing more detailed predictions. Extensive experiments on several occupancy benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art methods. For instance, OccGen relatively enhances the mIoU by 9.5%, 6.3%, and 13.3% on nuScenes-Occupancy dataset under the muli-modal, LiDAR-only, and camera-only settings, respectively. Moreover, as a generative perception model, OccGen exhibits desirable properties that discriminative models cannot achieve, such as providing uncertainty estimates alongside its multiple-step predictions.

Haoxuan Li, Yi Bin, Yunshan Ma et al.

Cross-modal retrieval (CMR) is a fundamental task in multimedia research, focused on retrieving semantically relevant targets across different modalities. While traditional CMR methods match text and image via embedding-based similarity calculations, recent advancements in pre-trained generative models have established generative retrieval as a promising alternative. This paradigm assigns each target a unique identifier and leverages a generative model to directly predict identifiers corresponding to input queries without explicit indexing. Despite its great potential, current generative CMR approaches still face semantic information insufficiency in both identifier construction and generation processes. To address these limitations, we propose a novel unified Semantic-enhanced generative Cross-mOdal REtrieval framework (SemCORE), designed to unleash the semantic understanding capabilities in generative cross-modal retrieval task. Specifically, we first construct a Structured natural language IDentifier (SID) that effectively aligns target identifiers with generative models optimized for natural language comprehension and generation. Furthermore, we introduce a Generative Semantic Verification (GSV) strategy enabling fine-grained target discrimination. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, SemCORE is the first framework to simultaneously consider both text-to-image and image-to-text retrieval tasks within generative cross-modal retrieval. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art generative cross-modal retrieval methods. Notably, SemCORE achieves substantial improvements across benchmark datasets, with an average increase of 8.65 points in Recall@1 for text-to-image retrieval.