DSLO: Deep Sequence LiDAR Odometry Based on Inconsistent Spatio-temporal PropagationHuixin Zhang, Guangming Wang, Xinrui Wu et al.
This paper introduces a 3D point cloud sequence learning model based on inconsistent spatio-temporal propagation for LiDAR odometry, termed DSLO. It consists of a pyramid structure with a spatial information reuse strategy, a sequential pose initialization module, a gated hierarchical pose refinement module, and a temporal feature propagation module. First, spatial features are encoded using a point feature pyramid, with features reused in successive pose estimations to reduce computational overhead. Second, a sequential pose initialization method is introduced, leveraging the high-frequency sampling characteristic of LiDAR to initialize the LiDAR pose. Then, a gated hierarchical pose refinement mechanism refines poses from coarse to fine by selectively retaining or discarding motion information from different layers based on gate estimations. Finally, temporal feature propagation is proposed to incorporate the historical motion information from point cloud sequences, and address the spatial inconsistency issue when transmitting motion information embedded in point clouds between frames. Experimental results on the KITTI odometry dataset and Argoverse dataset demonstrate that DSLO outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving at least a 15.67\% improvement on RTE and a 12.64\% improvement on RRE, while also achieving a 34.69\% reduction in runtime compared to baseline methods. Our implementation will be available at https://github.com/IRMVLab/DSLO.
Few-Shot Recognition via Stage-Wise Retrieval-Augmented FinetuningTian Liu, Huixin Zhang, Shubham Parashar et al.
Few-shot recognition (FSR) aims to train a classification model with only a few labeled examples of each concept concerned by a downstream task, where data annotation cost can be prohibitively high. We develop methods to solve FSR by leveraging a pretrained Vision-Language Model (VLM). We particularly explore retrieval-augmented learning (RAL), which retrieves open data, e.g., the VLM's pretraining dataset, to learn models for better serving downstream tasks. RAL has been studied in zero-shot recognition but remains under-explored in FSR. Although applying RAL to FSR may seem straightforward, we observe interesting and novel challenges and opportunities. First, somewhat surprisingly, finetuning a VLM on a large amount of retrieved data underperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot methods. This is due to the imbalanced distribution of retrieved data and its domain gaps with the few-shot examples in the downstream task. Second, more surprisingly, we find that simply finetuning a VLM solely on few-shot examples significantly outperforms previous FSR methods, and finetuning on the mix of retrieved and few-shot data yields even better results. Third, to mitigate the imbalanced distribution and domain gap issues, we propose Stage-Wise retrieval-Augmented fineTuning (SWAT), which involves end-to-end finetuning on mixed data in the first stage and retraining the classifier on the few-shot data in the second stage. Extensive experiments on nine popular benchmarks demonstrate that SWAT significantly outperforms previous methods by >6% accuracy.