Mehrtash Harandi

Pengxiang Li, Zhi Gao, Bofei Zhang et al.

Vision language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive progress in diverse applications, becoming a prevalent research direction. In this paper, we build FIRE, a feedback-refinement dataset, consisting of 1.1M multi-turn conversations that are derived from 27 source datasets, empowering VLMs to spontaneously refine their responses based on user feedback across diverse tasks. To scale up the data collection, FIRE is collected in two components: FIRE-100K and FIRE-1M, where FIRE-100K is generated by GPT-4V, and FIRE-1M is freely generated via models trained on FIRE-100K. Then, we build FIRE-Bench, a benchmark to comprehensively evaluate the feedback-refining capability of VLMs, which contains 11K feedback-refinement conversations as the test data, two evaluation settings, and a model to provide feedback for VLMs. We develop the FIRE-LLaVA model by fine-tuning LLaVA on FIRE-100K and FIRE-1M, which shows remarkable feedback-refining capability on FIRE-Bench and outperforms untrained VLMs by 50%, making more efficient user-agent interactions and underscoring the significance of the FIRE dataset.

Xiaomeng Fan, Wu Wei, Yuwei Wu et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly expected to generate fine-grained descriptions of visual content. However, we observe and theoretically show that generating fine-grained responses poses a reliability challenge, \textit{i.e.}, fine-grained generation is more error-prone than coarse-grained generation. This phenomenon suggests that models should generate the finest description that remains reliable rather than simply produce more specific outputs. To investigate this problem, we develop \textsc{GranFact}, a granularity-aware benchmark consisting of expert-verified multi-object images with coarse-to-fine category annotations. Then, we design a hierarchy-aware evaluation algorithm, which assesses both whether model predictions are visually correct and how specific the correct predictions are. We also propose a reliability-prioritized preference optimization method based on Direct Preference Optimization, which penalizes unreliable fine-grained claims while rewarding reliable specificity. Experiments on \textsc{GranFact} show that our method improves fine-grained generation while preserving reliability. Code and data are available \href{https://github.com/WeiWu2025/GranFact}{here}.

Yihang Chen, Qianyi Wu, Mehrtash Harandi et al.

In recent years, Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in representing 3D scenes. To expedite the rendering process, learnable explicit representations have been introduced for combination with implicit NeRF representation, which however results in a large storage space requirement. In this paper, we introduce the Context-based NeRF Compression (CNC) framework, which leverages highly efficient context models to provide a storage-friendly NeRF representation. Specifically, we excavate both level-wise and dimension-wise context dependencies to enable probability prediction for information entropy reduction. Additionally, we exploit hash collision and occupancy grids as strong prior knowledge for better context modeling. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to construct and exploit context models for NeRF compression. We achieve a size reduction of 100$\times$ and 70$\times$ with improved fidelity against the baseline Instant-NGP on Synthesic-NeRF and Tanks and Temples datasets, respectively. Additionally, we attain 86.7\% and 82.3\% storage size reduction against the SOTA NeRF compression method BiRF. Our code is available here: https://github.com/YihangChen-ee/CNC.

Amara Zuffer, Michael Burke, Mehrtash Harandi

The diversity of tasks and dynamic nature of reinforcement learning (RL) require RL agents to be able to learn sequentially and continuously, a learning paradigm known as continuous reinforcement learning. This survey reviews how continual learning transforms RL agents into dynamic continual learners. This enables RL agents to acquire and retain useful and reusable knowledge seamlessly. The paper delves into fundamental aspects of continual reinforcement learning, exploring key concepts, significant challenges, and novel methodologies. Special emphasis is placed on recent advancements in continual reinforcement learning within robotics, along with a succinct overview of evaluation environments utilized in prominent research, facilitating accessibility for newcomers to the field. The review concludes with a discussion on limitations and promising future directions, providing valuable insights for researchers and practitioners alike.