Shanghang Zhang

Tian Li, Xiang Chen, Zhen Dong et al. · berkeley, pku

Domain adaptive text classification is a challenging problem for the large-scale pretrained language models because they often require expensive additional labeled data to adapt to new domains. Existing works usually fails to leverage the implicit relationships among words across domains. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called Domain Adaptation with Structured Knowledge (DASK), to enhance domain adaptation by exploiting word-level semantic relationships. DASK first builds a knowledge graph to capture the relationship between pivot terms (domain-independent words) and non-pivot terms in the target domain. Then during training, DASK injects pivot-related knowledge graph information into source domain texts. For the downstream task, these knowledge-injected texts are fed into a BERT variant capable of processing knowledge-injected textual data. Thanks to the knowledge injection, our model learns domain-invariant features for non-pivots according to their relationships with pivots. DASK ensures the pivots to have domain-invariant behaviors by dynamically inferring via the polarity scores of candidate pivots during training with pseudo-labels. We validate DASK on a wide range of cross-domain sentiment classification tasks and observe up to 2.9% absolute performance improvement over baselines for 20 different domain pairs. Code will be made available at https://github.com/hikaru-nara/DASK.

Chi-Min Chan, Weize Chen, Yusheng Su et al. · tsinghua

Text evaluation has historically posed significant challenges, often demanding substantial labor and time cost. With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), researchers have explored LLMs' potential as alternatives for human evaluation. While these single-agent-based approaches show promise, experimental results suggest that further advancements are needed to bridge the gap between their current effectiveness and human-level evaluation quality. Recognizing that best practices of human evaluation processes often involve multiple human annotators collaborating in the evaluation, we resort to a multi-agent debate framework, moving beyond single-agent prompting strategies. The multi-agent-based approach enables a group of LLMs to synergize with an array of intelligent counterparts, harnessing their distinct capabilities and expertise to enhance efficiency and effectiveness in handling intricate tasks. In this paper, we construct a multi-agent referee team called ChatEval to autonomously discuss and evaluate the quality of generated responses from different models on open-ended questions and traditional natural language generation (NLG) tasks. Our analysis shows that ChatEval transcends mere textual scoring, offering a human-mimicking evaluation process for reliable assessments. Our code is available at https://github.com/chanchimin/ChatEval.

Yijiang Liu, Huanrui Yang, Zhen Dong et al. · berkeley

The complicated architecture and high training cost of vision transformers urge the exploration of post-training quantization. However, the heavy-tailed distribution of vision transformer activations hinders the effectiveness of previous post-training quantization methods, even with advanced quantizer designs. Instead of tuning the quantizer to better fit the complicated activation distribution, this paper proposes NoisyQuant, a quantizer-agnostic enhancement for the post-training activation quantization performance of vision transformers. We make a surprising theoretical discovery that for a given quantizer, adding a fixed Uniform noisy bias to the values being quantized can significantly reduce the quantization error under provable conditions. Building on the theoretical insight, NoisyQuant achieves the first success on actively altering the heavy-tailed activation distribution with additive noisy bias to fit a given quantizer. Extensive experiments show NoisyQuant largely improves the post-training quantization performance of vision transformer with minimal computation overhead. For instance, on linear uniform 6-bit activation quantization, NoisyQuant improves SOTA top-1 accuracy on ImageNet by up to 1.7%, 1.1% and 0.5% for ViT, DeiT, and Swin Transformer respectively, achieving on-par or even higher performance than previous nonlinear, mixed-precision quantization.

Xiuying Wei, Yunchen Zhang, Xiangguo Zhang et al.

Transformer architecture has become the fundamental element of the widespread natural language processing~(NLP) models. With the trends of large NLP models, the increasing memory and computation costs hinder their efficient deployment on resource-limited devices. Therefore, transformer quantization attracts wide research interest. Recent work recognizes that structured outliers are the critical bottleneck for quantization performance. However, their proposed methods increase the computation overhead and still leave the outliers there. To fundamentally address this problem, this paper delves into the inherent inducement and importance of the outliers. We discover that $\boldsymbol γ$ in LayerNorm (LN) acts as a sinful amplifier for the outliers, and the importance of outliers varies greatly where some outliers provided by a few tokens cover a large area but can be clipped sharply without negative impacts. Motivated by these findings, we propose an outlier suppression framework including two components: Gamma Migration and Token-Wise Clipping. The Gamma Migration migrates the outlier amplifier to subsequent modules in an equivalent transformation, contributing to a more quantization-friendly model without any extra burden. The Token-Wise Clipping takes advantage of the large variance of token range and designs a token-wise coarse-to-fine pipeline, obtaining a clipping range with minimal final quantization loss in an efficient way. This framework effectively suppresses the outliers and can be used in a plug-and-play mode. Extensive experiments prove that our framework surpasses the existing works and, for the first time, pushes the 6-bit post-training BERT quantization to the full-precision (FP) level. Our code is available at https://github.com/wimh966/outlier_suppression.

Qingpo Wuwu, Xiaobao Wei, Peng Chen et al.

While 3D Gaussian Splatting has shown promising results in street scene reconstruction, existing methods require massive numbers of Gaussian primitives to capture fine details, leading to prohibitive storage costs and slow rendering speeds. We observe that dynamic objects (e.g., vehicles and pedestrians) demand high-fidelity representations to maintain temporal consistency, while static background regions often contain substantial redundancy. Motivated by this, we propose SparseStreet, a general compression framework specifically designed for street scenes. First, we introduce a node-based learnable pruning strategy that systematically removes low-contributing Gaussian primitives while preserving visually critical regions. Second, after the scene representation stabilizes, we apply background compression, further reducing redundancy in static regions. Our method effectively preserves the geometry and appearance of dynamic objects while significantly reducing the total number of Gaussian primitives. Extensive experiments on the Waymo and nuScenes demonstrate that SparseStreet achieves up to 80% compression ratio with minimal quality degradation, enabling resource-efficient, high-fidelity dynamic scene reconstruction. Project website: https://sparsestreet.github.io/.

Yifan Zhang, Zhen Dong, Huanrui Yang et al. · berkeley

Multi-view 3D detection based on BEV (bird-eye-view) has recently achieved significant improvements. However, the huge memory consumption of state-of-the-art models makes it hard to deploy them on vehicles, and the non-trivial latency will affect the real-time perception of streaming applications. Despite the wide application of quantization to lighten models, we show in our paper that directly applying quantization in BEV tasks will 1) make the training unstable, and 2) lead to intolerable performance degradation. To solve these issues, our method QD-BEV enables a novel view-guided distillation (VGD) objective, which can stabilize the quantization-aware training (QAT) while enhancing the model performance by leveraging both image features and BEV features. Our experiments show that QD-BEV achieves similar or even better accuracy than previous methods with significant efficiency gains. On the nuScenes datasets, the 4-bit weight and 6-bit activation quantized QD-BEV-Tiny model achieves 37.2% NDS with only 15.8 MB model size, outperforming BevFormer-Tiny by 1.8% with an 8x model compression. On the Small and Base variants, QD-BEV models also perform superbly and achieve 47.9% NDS (28.2 MB) and 50.9% NDS (32.9 MB), respectively.

Lirui Xiao, Huanrui Yang, Zhen Dong et al. · berkeley

Mixed-precision quantization has been widely applied on deep neural networks (DNNs) as it leads to significantly better efficiency-accuracy tradeoffs compared to uniform quantization. Meanwhile, determining the exact precision of each layer remains challenging. Previous attempts on bit-level regularization and pruning-based dynamic precision adjustment during training suffer from noisy gradients and unstable convergence. In this work, we propose Continuous Sparsification Quantization (CSQ), a bit-level training method to search for mixed-precision quantization schemes with improved stability. CSQ stabilizes the bit-level mixed-precision training process with a bi-level gradual continuous sparsification on both the bit values of the quantized weights and the bit selection in determining the quantization precision of each layer. The continuous sparsification scheme enables fully-differentiable training without gradient approximation while achieving an exact quantized model in the end.A budget-aware regularization of total model size enables the dynamic growth and pruning of each layer's precision towards a mixed-precision quantization scheme of the desired size. Extensive experiments show CSQ achieves better efficiency-accuracy tradeoff than previous methods on multiple models and datasets.

Anthony Chen, Kevin Zhang, Renrui Zhang et al.

Masked Autoencoders learn strong visual representations and achieve state-of-the-art results in several independent modalities, yet very few works have addressed their capabilities in multi-modality settings. In this work, we focus on point cloud and RGB image data, two modalities that are often presented together in the real world, and explore their meaningful interactions. To improve upon the cross-modal synergy in existing works, we propose PiMAE, a self-supervised pre-training framework that promotes 3D and 2D interaction through three aspects. Specifically, we first notice the importance of masking strategies between the two sources and utilize a projection module to complementarily align the mask and visible tokens of the two modalities. Then, we utilize a well-crafted two-branch MAE pipeline with a novel shared decoder to promote cross-modality interaction in the mask tokens. Finally, we design a unique cross-modal reconstruction module to enhance representation learning for both modalities. Through extensive experiments performed on large-scale RGB-D scene understanding benchmarks (SUN RGB-D and ScannetV2), we discover it is nontrivial to interactively learn point-image features, where we greatly improve multiple 3D detectors, 2D detectors, and few-shot classifiers by 2.9%, 6.7%, and 2.4%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/BLVLab/PiMAE.

Xiuyu Li, Yijiang Liu, Long Lian et al. · berkeley

Diffusion models have achieved great success in image synthesis through iterative noise estimation using deep neural networks. However, the slow inference, high memory consumption, and computation intensity of the noise estimation model hinder the efficient adoption of diffusion models. Although post-training quantization (PTQ) is considered a go-to compression method for other tasks, it does not work out-of-the-box on diffusion models. We propose a novel PTQ method specifically tailored towards the unique multi-timestep pipeline and model architecture of the diffusion models, which compresses the noise estimation network to accelerate the generation process. We identify the key difficulty of diffusion model quantization as the changing output distributions of noise estimation networks over multiple time steps and the bimodal activation distribution of the shortcut layers within the noise estimation network. We tackle these challenges with timestep-aware calibration and split shortcut quantization in this work. Experimental results show that our proposed method is able to quantize full-precision unconditional diffusion models into 4-bit while maintaining comparable performance (small FID change of at most 2.34 compared to >100 for traditional PTQ) in a training-free manner. Our approach can also be applied to text-guided image generation, where we can run stable diffusion in 4-bit weights with high generation quality for the first time.

Xiaoqi Li, Jiaming Liu, Shizun Wang et al.

Recently, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are utilized to reduce the bandwidth and improve the quality of Internet video delivery. Existing methods train corresponding content-aware super-resolution (SR) model for each video chunk on the server, and stream low-resolution (LR) video chunks along with SR models to the client. Although they achieve promising results, the huge computational cost of network training limits their practical applications. In this paper, we present a method named Efficient Meta-Tuning (EMT) to reduce the computational cost. Instead of training from scratch, EMT adapts a meta-learned model to the first chunk of the input video. As for the following chunks, it fine-tunes the partial parameters selected by gradient masking of previous adapted model. In order to achieve further speedup for EMT, we propose a novel sampling strategy to extract the most challenging patches from video frames. The proposed strategy is highly efficient and brings negligible additional cost. Our method significantly reduces the computational cost and achieves even better performance, paving the way for applying neural video delivery techniques to practical applications. We conduct extensive experiments based on various efficient SR architectures, including ESPCN, SRCNN, FSRCNN and EDSR-1, demonstrating the generalization ability of our work. The code is released at \url{https://github.com/Neural-video-delivery/EMT-Pytorch-ECCV2022}.

Jianyang Gu, Kai Wang, Hao Luo et al.

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has been increasingly appealing to the society of object Re-Identification (ReID), for that task-specific architectures significantly improve the retrieval performance. Previous works explore new optimizing targets and search spaces for NAS ReID, yet they neglect the difference of training schemes between image classification and ReID. In this work, we propose a novel Twins Contrastive Mechanism (TCM) to provide more appropriate supervision for ReID architecture search. TCM reduces the category overlaps between the training and validation data, and assists NAS in simulating real-world ReID training schemes. We then design a Multi-Scale Interaction (MSI) search space to search for rational interaction operations between multi-scale features. In addition, we introduce a Spatial Alignment Module (SAM) to further enhance the attention consistency confronted with images from different sources. Under the proposed NAS scheme, a specific architecture is automatically searched, named as MSINet. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art ReID methods on both in-domain and cross-domain scenarios. Source code available in https://github.com/vimar-gu/MSINet.

Renrui Zhang, Xinyu Wei, Dongzhi Jiang et al.

The mathematical capabilities of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remain under-explored with three areas to be improved: visual encoding of math diagrams, diagram-language alignment, and chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. This draws forth an urgent demand for an effective training paradigm and a large-scale, comprehensive dataset with detailed CoT rationales, which is challenging to collect and costly to annotate manually. To tackle this issue, we propose MAVIS, a MAthematical VISual instruction tuning pipeline for MLLMs, featuring an automatic data engine to efficiently create mathematical visual datasets. We design the data generation process to be entirely independent of human intervention or GPT API usage, while ensuring the diagram-caption correspondence, question-answer correctness, and CoT reasoning quality. With this approach, we curate two datasets, MAVIS-Caption (558K diagram-caption pairs) and MAVIS-Instruct (834K visual math problems with CoT rationales), and propose four progressive stages for training MLLMs from scratch. First, we utilize MAVIS-Caption to fine-tune a math-specific vision encoder (CLIP-Math) through contrastive learning, tailored for improved diagram visual encoding. Second, we also leverage MAVIS-Caption to align the CLIP-Math with a large language model (LLM) by a projection layer, enhancing vision-language alignment in mathematical domains. Third, we adopt MAVIS-Instruct to perform the instruction tuning for robust problem-solving skills, and term the resulting model as MAVIS-7B. Fourth, we apply Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to enhance the CoT capabilities of our model, further refining its step-wise reasoning performance. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/MAVIS

Jiaming Liu, Qizhe Zhang, Xiaoqi Li et al.

Neuromorphic spike data, an upcoming modality with high temporal resolution, has shown promising potential in autonomous driving by mitigating the challenges posed by high-velocity motion blur. However, training the spike depth estimation network holds significant challenges in two aspects: sparse spatial information for pixel-wise tasks and difficulties in achieving paired depth labels for temporally intensive spike streams. Therefore, we introduce open-source RGB data to support spike depth estimation, leveraging its annotations and spatial information. The inherent differences in modalities and data distribution make it challenging to directly apply transfer learning from open-source RGB to target spike data. To this end, we propose a cross-modality cross-domain (BiCross) framework to realize unsupervised spike depth estimation by introducing simulated mediate source spike data. Specifically, we design a Coarse-to-Fine Knowledge Distillation (CFKD) approach to facilitate comprehensive cross-modality knowledge transfer while preserving the unique strengths of both modalities, utilizing a spike-oriented uncertainty scheme. Then, we propose a Self-Correcting Teacher-Student (SCTS) mechanism to screen out reliable pixel-wise pseudo labels and ease the domain shift of the student model, which avoids error accumulation in target spike data. To verify the effectiveness of BiCross, we conduct extensive experiments on four scenarios, including Synthetic to Real, Extreme Weather, Scene Changing, and Real Spike. Our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performances, compared with RGB-oriented unsupervised depth estimation methods. Code and dataset: https://github.com/Theia-4869/BiCross

Xiaobao Wei, Renrui Zhang, Jiarui Wu et al.

Neural 3D reconstruction from multi-view images has recently attracted increasing attention from the community. Existing methods normally learn a neural field for the whole scene, while it is still under-explored how to reconstruct a target object indicated by users. Considering the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has shown effectiveness in segmenting any 2D images, in this paper, we propose NTO3D, a novel high-quality Neural Target Object 3D (NTO3D) reconstruction method, which leverages the benefits of both neural field and SAM. We first propose a novel strategy to lift the multi-view 2D segmentation masks of SAM into a unified 3D occupancy field. The 3D occupancy field is then projected into 2D space and generates the new prompts for SAM. This process is iterative until convergence to separate the target object from the scene. After this, we then lift the 2D features of the SAM encoder into a 3D feature field in order to improve the reconstruction quality of the target object. NTO3D lifts the 2D masks and features of SAM into the 3D neural field for high-quality neural target object 3D reconstruction. We conduct detailed experiments on several benchmark datasets to demonstrate the advantages of our method. The code will be available at: https://github.com/ucwxb/NTO3D.

Qiang Zhou, Weize Li, Lihan Jiang et al.

Object anomaly detection is an important problem in the field of machine vision and has seen remarkable progress recently. However, two significant challenges hinder its research and application. First, existing datasets lack comprehensive visual information from various pose angles. They usually have an unrealistic assumption that the anomaly-free training dataset is pose-aligned, and the testing samples have the same pose as the training data. However, in practice, anomaly may exist in any regions on a object, the training and query samples may have different poses, calling for the study on pose-agnostic anomaly detection. Second, the absence of a consensus on experimental protocols for pose-agnostic anomaly detection leads to unfair comparisons of different methods, hindering the research on pose-agnostic anomaly detection. To address these issues, we develop Multi-pose Anomaly Detection (MAD) dataset and Pose-agnostic Anomaly Detection (PAD) benchmark, which takes the first step to address the pose-agnostic anomaly detection problem. Specifically, we build MAD using 20 complex-shaped LEGO toys including 4K views with various poses, and high-quality and diverse 3D anomalies in both simulated and real environments. Additionally, we propose a novel method OmniposeAD, trained using MAD, specifically designed for pose-agnostic anomaly detection. Through comprehensive evaluations, we demonstrate the relevance of our dataset and method. Furthermore, we provide an open-source benchmark library, including dataset and baseline methods that cover 8 anomaly detection paradigms, to facilitate future research and application in this domain. Code, data, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/EricLee0224/PAD.

Zhen Dong, Kaicheng Zhou, Guohao Li et al. · berkeley

Neural architecture search (NAS) has shown great success in the automatic design of deep neural networks (DNNs). However, the best way to use data to search network architectures is still unclear and under exploration. Previous work has analyzed the necessity of having ground-truth labels in NAS and inspired broad interest. In this work, we take a further step to question whether real data is necessary for NAS to be effective. The answer to this question is important for applications with limited amount of accessible data, and can help people improve NAS by leveraging the extra flexibility of data generation. To explore if NAS needs real data, we construct three types of unreal datasets using: 1) randomly labeled real images; 2) generated images and labels; and 3) generated Gaussian noise with random labels. These datasets facilitate to analyze the generalization and expressivity of the searched architectures. We study the performance of architectures searched on these constructed datasets using popular differentiable NAS methods. Extensive experiments on CIFAR, ImageNet and CheXpert show that the searched architectures can achieve promising results compared with those derived from the conventional NAS pipeline with real labeled data, suggesting the feasibility of performing NAS with unreal data.

Yuheng Lu, Chenfeng Xu, Xiaobao Wei et al.

The goal of open-vocabulary detection is to identify novel objects based on arbitrary textual descriptions. In this paper, we address open-vocabulary 3D point-cloud detection by a dividing-and-conquering strategy, which involves: 1) developing a point-cloud detector that can learn a general representation for localizing various objects, and 2) connecting textual and point-cloud representations to enable the detector to classify novel object categories based on text prompting. Specifically, we resort to rich image pre-trained models, by which the point-cloud detector learns localizing objects under the supervision of predicted 2D bounding boxes from 2D pre-trained detectors. Moreover, we propose a novel de-biased triplet cross-modal contrastive learning to connect the modalities of image, point-cloud and text, thereby enabling the point-cloud detector to benefit from vision-language pre-trained models,i.e.,CLIP. The novel use of image and vision-language pre-trained models for point-cloud detectors allows for open-vocabulary 3D object detection without the need for 3D annotations. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method improves at least 3.03 points and 7.47 points over a wide range of baselines on the ScanNet and SUN RGB-D datasets, respectively. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive analysis to explain why our approach works.

Jinze Yu, Jiaming Liu, Xiaobao Wei et al.

Recently, DEtection TRansformer (DETR), an end-to-end object detection pipeline, has achieved promising performance. However, it requires large-scale labeled data and suffers from domain shift, especially when no labeled data is available in the target domain. To solve this problem, we propose an end-to-end cross-domain detection Transformer based on the mean teacher framework, MTTrans, which can fully exploit unlabeled target domain data in object detection training and transfer knowledge between domains via pseudo labels. We further propose the comprehensive multi-level feature alignment to improve the pseudo labels generated by the mean teacher framework taking advantage of the cross-scale self-attention mechanism in Deformable DETR. Image and object features are aligned at the local, global, and instance levels with domain query-based feature alignment (DQFA), bi-level graph-based prototype alignment (BGPA), and token-wise image feature alignment (TIFA). On the other hand, the unlabeled target domain data pseudo-labeled and available for the object detection training by the mean teacher framework can lead to better feature extraction and alignment. Thus, the mean teacher framework and the comprehensive multi-level feature alignment can be optimized iteratively and mutually based on the architecture of Transformers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in three domain adaptation scenarios, especially the result of Sim10k to Cityscapes scenario is remarkably improved from 52.6 mAP to 57.9 mAP. Code will be released.

Jiaxin Ge, Hongyin Luo, Siyuan Qian et al. · pku

Language-Image Pre-training has demonstrated promising results on zero-shot and few-shot downstream tasks by prompting visual models with natural language prompts. However, most recent studies only use a single prompt for tuning, neglecting the inherent step-to-step cognitive reasoning process that humans conduct in complex task settings, for example, when processing images from unfamiliar domains. Chain of Thought is a simple and effective approximation to human reasoning process and has been proven useful for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Based on this cognitive intuition, we believe that conducting effective reasoning is also an important problem in visual tasks, and a chain of thought could be a solution to this problem. In this work, we propose a novel chain of thought prompt tuning for vision-language modeling. Extensive experiments show that our method not only generalizes better in image classification tasks, has greater transferability beyond a single dataset, and has stronger domain generalization performance, but also performs much better in imagetext retrieval and visual question answering, which require more reasoning capabilities. We are the first to successfully adapt chain-of-thought prompting that combines visual and textual embeddings. We will release our codes

Senqiao Yang, Jiarui Wu, Jiaming Liu et al. · pku

The visual prompts have provided an efficient manner in addressing visual cross-domain problems. In previous works, Visual Domain Prompt (VDP) first introduces domain prompts to tackle the classification Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) problem by warping image-level prompts on the input and fine-tuning prompts for each target domain. However, since the image-level prompts mask out continuous spatial details in the prompt-allocated region, it will suffer from inaccurate contextual information and limited domain knowledge extraction, particularly when dealing with dense prediction TTA problems. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel Sparse Visual Domain Prompts (SVDP) approach, which holds minimal trainable parameters (e.g., 0.1\%) in the image-level prompt and reserves more spatial information of the input. To better apply SVDP in extracting domain-specific knowledge, we introduce the Domain Prompt Placement (DPP) method to adaptively allocates trainable parameters of SVDP on the pixels with large distribution shifts. Furthermore, recognizing that each target domain sample exhibits a unique domain shift, we design Domain Prompt Updating (DPU) strategy to optimize prompt parameters differently for each sample, facilitating efficient adaptation to the target domain. Extensive experiments were conducted on widely-used TTA and continual TTA benchmarks, and our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both semantic segmentation and depth estimation tasks.

Xiaobao Wei, Jiajun Cao, Yizhu Jin et al.

With the development of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), many efforts have been made to handle medical image segmentation. Traditional methods such as nnUNet train specific segmentation models on the individual datasets. Plenty of recent methods have been proposed to adapt the foundational Segment Anything Model (SAM) to medical image segmentation. However, they still focus on discrete representations to generate pixel-wise predictions, which are spatially inflexible and scale poorly to higher resolution. In contrast, implicit methods learn continuous representations for segmentation, which is crucial for medical image segmentation. In this paper, we propose I-MedSAM, which leverages the benefits of both continuous representations and SAM, to obtain better cross-domain ability and accurate boundary delineation. Since medical image segmentation needs to predict detailed segmentation boundaries, we designed a novel adapter to enhance the SAM features with high-frequency information during Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT). To convert the SAM features and coordinates into continuous segmentation output, we utilize Implicit Neural Representation (INR) to learn an implicit segmentation decoder. We also propose an uncertainty-guided sampling strategy for efficient learning of INR. Extensive evaluations on 2D medical image segmentation tasks have shown that our proposed method with only 1.6M trainable parameters outperforms existing methods including discrete and implicit methods. The code will be available at: https://github.com/ucwxb/I-MedSAM.

Shichao Fan, Kun Wu, Zhengping Che et al.

Recent progress in large-scale robotic datasets and vision-language models (VLMs) has advanced research on vision-language-action (VLA) models. However, existing VLA models still face two fundamental challenges: (i) producing precise low-level actions from high-dimensional observations, (ii) bridging domain gaps across heterogeneous data sources, including diverse robot embodiments and human demonstrations. Existing methods often encode latent variables from either visual dynamics or robotic actions to guide policy learning, but they fail to fully exploit the complementary multi-modal knowledge present in large-scale, heterogeneous datasets. In this work, we present X Robotic Model 1 (XR-1), a novel framework for versatile and scalable VLA learning across diverse robots, tasks, and environments. XR-1 introduces the \emph{Unified Vision-Motion Codes (UVMC)}, a discrete latent representation learned via a dual-branch VQ-VAE that jointly encodes visual dynamics and robotic motion. UVMC addresses these challenges by (i) serving as an intermediate representation between the observations and actions, and (ii) aligning multimodal dynamic information from heterogeneous data sources to capture complementary knowledge. To effectively exploit UVMC, we propose a three-stage training paradigm: (i) self-supervised UVMC learning, (ii) UVMC-guided pretraining on large-scale cross-embodiment robotic datasets, and (iii) task-specific post-training. We validate XR-1 through extensive real-world experiments with more than 14,000 rollouts on six different robot embodiments, spanning over 120 diverse manipulation tasks. XR-1 consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines such as $π_{0.5}$, $π_0$, RDT, UniVLA, and GR00T-N1.5 while demonstrating strong generalization to novel objects, background variations, distractors, and illumination changes. Our project is at https://xr-1-vla.github.io/.

Yixiong Zou, Shanghang Zhang, Yuhua Li et al.

Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) is designed to incrementally recognize novel classes with only few training samples after the (pre-)training on base classes with sufficient samples, which focuses on both base-class performance and novel-class generalization. A well known modification to the base-class training is to apply a margin to the base-class classification. However, a dilemma exists that we can hardly achieve both good base-class performance and novel-class generalization simultaneously by applying the margin during the base-class training, which is still under explored. In this paper, we study the cause of such dilemma for FSCIL. We first interpret this dilemma as a class-level overfitting (CO) problem from the aspect of pattern learning, and then find its cause lies in the easily-satisfied constraint of learning margin-based patterns. Based on the analysis, we propose a novel margin-based FSCIL method to mitigate the CO problem by providing the pattern learning process with extra constraint from the margin-based patterns themselves. Extensive experiments on CIFAR100, Caltech-USCD Birds-200-2011 (CUB200), and miniImageNet demonstrate that the proposed method effectively mitigates the CO problem and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Yulu Gan, Mingjie Pan, Rongyu Zhang et al. · pku

When facing changing environments in the real world, the lightweight model on client devices suffers from severe performance drops under distribution shifts. The main limitations of the existing device model lie in (1) unable to update due to the computation limit of the device, (2) the limited generalization ability of the lightweight model. Meanwhile, recent large models have shown strong generalization capability on the cloud while they can not be deployed on client devices due to poor computation constraints. To enable the device model to deal with changing environments, we propose a new learning paradigm of Cloud-Device Collaborative Continual Adaptation, which encourages collaboration between cloud and device and improves the generalization of the device model. Based on this paradigm, we further propose an Uncertainty-based Visual Prompt Adapted (U-VPA) teacher-student model to transfer the generalization capability of the large model on the cloud to the device model. Specifically, we first design the Uncertainty Guided Sampling (UGS) to screen out challenging data continuously and transmit the most out-of-distribution samples from the device to the cloud. Then we propose a Visual Prompt Learning Strategy with Uncertainty guided updating (VPLU) to specifically deal with the selected samples with more distribution shifts. We transmit the visual prompts to the device and concatenate them with the incoming data to pull the device testing distribution closer to the cloud training distribution. We conduct extensive experiments on two object detection datasets with continually changing environments. Our proposed U-VPA teacher-student framework outperforms previous state-of-the-art test time adaptation and device-cloud collaboration methods. The code and datasets will be released.

Xiangyang Zhu, Renrui Zhang, Bowei He et al.

Large-scale pre-trained models have shown promising open-world performance for both vision and language tasks. However, their transferred capacity on 3D point clouds is still limited and only constrained to the classification task. In this paper, we first collaborate CLIP and GPT to be a unified 3D open-world learner, named as PointCLIP V2, which fully unleashes their potential for zero-shot 3D classification, segmentation, and detection. To better align 3D data with the pre-trained language knowledge, PointCLIP V2 contains two key designs. For the visual end, we prompt CLIP via a shape projection module to generate more realistic depth maps, narrowing the domain gap between projected point clouds with natural images. For the textual end, we prompt the GPT model to generate 3D-specific text as the input of CLIP's textual encoder. Without any training in 3D domains, our approach significantly surpasses PointCLIP by +42.90%, +40.44%, and +28.75% accuracy on three datasets for zero-shot 3D classification. On top of that, V2 can be extended to few-shot 3D classification, zero-shot 3D part segmentation, and 3D object detection in a simple manner, demonstrating our generalization ability for unified 3D open-world learning.

Shihan Wu, Xuecheng Liu, Shaoxuan Xie et al.

Despite the critical role of bimanual manipulation in endowing robots with human-like dexterity, large-scale and diverse datasets remain scarce due to the significant hardware heterogeneity across bimanual robotic platforms. To bridge this gap, we introduce RoboCOIN, a large-scale multi-embodiment bimanual manipulation dataset comprising over 180,000 demonstrations collected from 15 distinct robotic platforms. Spanning 16 diverse environments-including residential, commercial, and industrial settings-the dataset features 421 bimanual tasks systematically categorized by 39 bimanual collaboration actions and 432 objects. A key innovation of our work is the hierarchical capability pyramid, which provides granular annotations ranging from trajectory-level concepts to segment-level subtasks and frame-level kinematics. Furthermore, we present CoRobot, an efficient data processing pipeline powered by the Robot Trajectory Markup Language (RTML), designed to facilitate quality assessment, automated annotation, and unified multi-embodiment and data management. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RoboCOIN in enhancing the performance of various bimanual manipulation models across a wide spectrum of robotic embodiments. The entire dataset and codebase are fully open-sourced, providing a valuable resource for advancing research in bimanual and multi-embodiment manipulation.

Yuheng Lu, Chenfeng Xu, Xiaobao Wei et al.

Current point-cloud detection methods have difficulty detecting the open-vocabulary objects in the real world, due to their limited generalization capability. Moreover, it is extremely laborious and expensive to collect and fully annotate a point-cloud detection dataset with numerous classes of objects, leading to the limited classes of existing point-cloud datasets and hindering the model to learn general representations to achieve open-vocabulary point-cloud detection. As far as we know, we are the first to study the problem of open-vocabulary 3D point-cloud detection. Instead of seeking a point-cloud dataset with full labels, we resort to ImageNet1K to broaden the vocabulary of the point-cloud detector. We propose OV-3DETIC, an Open-Vocabulary 3D DETector using Image-level Class supervision. Specifically, we take advantage of two modalities, the image modality for recognition and the point-cloud modality for localization, to generate pseudo labels for unseen classes. Then we propose a novel debiased cross-modal contrastive learning method to transfer the knowledge from image modality to point-cloud modality during training. Without hurting the latency during inference, OV-3DETIC makes the point-cloud detector capable of achieving open-vocabulary detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed OV-3DETIC achieves at least 10.77 % mAP improvement (absolute value) and 9.56 % mAP improvement (absolute value) by a wide range of baselines on the SUN-RGBD dataset and ScanNet dataset, respectively. Besides, we conduct sufficient experiments to shed light on why the proposed OV-3DETIC works.

Lingfeng Zhang, Xiaoshuai Hao, Qinwen Xu et al.

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) is a key task in Embodied AI, requiring agents to navigate diverse and unseen environments while following natural language instructions. Traditional approaches rely heavily on historical observations as spatio-temporal contexts for decision making, leading to significant storage and computational overhead. In this paper, we introduce MapNav, a novel end-to-end VLN model that leverages Annotated Semantic Map (ASM) to replace historical frames. Specifically, our approach constructs a top-down semantic map at the start of each episode and update it at each timestep, allowing for precise object mapping and structured navigation information. Then, we enhance this map with explicit textual labels for key regions, transforming abstract semantics into clear navigation cues and generate our ASM. MapNav agent using the constructed ASM as input, and use the powerful end-to-end capabilities of VLM to empower VLN. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MapNav achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both simulated and real-world environments, validating the effectiveness of our method. Moreover, we will release our ASM generation source code and dataset to ensure reproducibility, contributing valuable resources to the field. We believe that our proposed MapNav can be used as a new memory representation method in VLN, paving the way for future research in this field.

Mingjie Pan, Yulu Gan, Fangxu Zhou et al. · pku

Three-dimensional microscopy is often limited by anisotropic spatial resolution, resulting in lower axial resolution than lateral resolution. Current State-of-The-Art (SoTA) isotropic reconstruction methods utilizing deep neural networks can achieve impressive super-resolution performance in fixed imaging settings. However, their generality in practical use is limited by degraded performance caused by artifacts and blurring when facing unseen anisotropic factors. To address these issues, we propose DiffuseIR, an unsupervised method for isotropic reconstruction based on diffusion models. First, we pre-train a diffusion model to learn the structural distribution of biological tissue from lateral microscopic images, resulting in generating naturally high-resolution images. Then we use low-axial-resolution microscopy images to condition the generation process of the diffusion model and generate high-axial-resolution reconstruction results. Since the diffusion model learns the universal structural distribution of biological tissues, which is independent of the axial resolution, DiffuseIR can reconstruct authentic images with unseen low-axial resolutions into a high-axial resolution without requiring re-training. The proposed DiffuseIR achieves SoTA performance in experiments on EM data and can even compete with supervised methods.

Yulin Luo, Rui Zhao, Xiaobao Wei et al. · pku

Adverse weather removal tasks like deraining, desnowing, and dehazing are usually treated as separate tasks. However, in practical autonomous driving scenarios, the type, intensity,and mixing degree of weather are unknown, so handling each task separately cannot deal with the complex practical scenarios. In this paper, we study the blind adverse weather removal problem. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is a popular model that adopts a learnable gate to route the input to different expert networks. The principle of MoE involves using adaptive networks to process different types of unknown inputs. Therefore, MoE has great potential for blind adverse weather removal. However, the original MoE module is inadequate for coupled multiple weather types and fails to utilize multi-scale features for better performance. To this end, we propose a method called Weather-aware Multi-scale MoE (WM-MoE) based on Transformer for blind weather removal. WM-MoE includes two key designs: WEather-Aware Router (WEAR) and Multi-Scale Experts (MSE). WEAR assigns experts for each image token based on decoupled content and weather features, which enhances the model's capability to process multiple adverse weathers. To obtain discriminative weather features from images, we propose Weather Guidance Fine-grained Contrastive Learning (WGF-CL), which utilizes weather cluster information to guide the assignment of positive and negative samples for each image token. Since processing different weather types requires different receptive fields, MSE leverages multi-scale features to enhance the spatial relationship modeling capability, facilitating the high-quality restoration of diverse weather types and intensities. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in blind adverse weather removal on two public datasets and our dataset. We also demonstrate the advantage of our method on downstream segmentation tasks.

Mingjie Pan, Jiaming Liu, Renrui Zhang et al.

3D occupancy prediction holds significant promise in the fields of robot perception and autonomous driving, which quantifies 3D scenes into grid cells with semantic labels. Recent works mainly utilize complete occupancy labels in 3D voxel space for supervision. However, the expensive annotation process and sometimes ambiguous labels have severely constrained the usability and scalability of 3D occupancy models. To address this, we present RenderOcc, a novel paradigm for training 3D occupancy models only using 2D labels. Specifically, we extract a NeRF-style 3D volume representation from multi-view images, and employ volume rendering techniques to establish 2D renderings, thus enabling direct 3D supervision from 2D semantics and depth labels. Additionally, we introduce an Auxiliary Ray method to tackle the issue of sparse viewpoints in autonomous driving scenarios, which leverages sequential frames to construct comprehensive 2D rendering for each object. To our best knowledge, RenderOcc is the first attempt to train multi-view 3D occupancy models only using 2D labels, reducing the dependence on costly 3D occupancy annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RenderOcc achieves comparable performance to models fully supervised with 3D labels, underscoring the significance of this approach in real-world applications.

Xiaohong Liu, Guoxing Yang, Yulin Luo et al.

Radiology is a vital and complex component of modern clinical workflow and covers many tasks. Recently, vision-language (VL) foundation models in medicine have shown potential in processing multimodal information, offering a unified solution for various radiology tasks. However, existing studies either pre-trained VL models on natural data or did not fully integrate vision-language architecture and pretraining, often neglecting the unique multimodal complexity in radiology images and their textual contexts. Additionally, their practical applicability in real-world scenarios remains underexplored. Here, we present RadFound, a large and open-source vision-language foundation model tailored for radiology, that is trained on the most extensive dataset of over 8.1 million images and 250,000 image-text pairs, covering 19 major organ systems and 10 imaging modalities. To establish expert-level multimodal perception and generation capabilities, RadFound introduces an enhanced vision encoder to capture intra-image local features and inter-image contextual information, and a unified cross-modal learning design tailored to radiology. To fully assess the models' capability, we construct a benchmark, RadVLBench, including radiology interpretation tasks like medical vision-language question-answering, as well as text generation tasks ranging from captioning to report generation. We also propose a human evaluation framework. When evaluated on the real-world benchmark involving three representative modalities, 2D images (chest X-rays), multi-view images (mammograms), and 3D images (thyroid CT scans), RadFound significantly outperforms other VL foundation models on both quantitative metrics and human evaluation. In summary, the development of RadFound represents an advancement in radiology generalists, demonstrating broad applicability potential for integration into clinical workflows.

Jianing Li, Ming Lu, Jiaming Liu et al. · pku

Recently, Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representation has gained increasing attention in multi-view 3D object detection, which has demonstrated promising applications in autonomous driving. Although multi-view camera systems can be deployed at low cost, the lack of depth information makes current approaches adopt large models for good performance. Therefore, it is essential to improve the efficiency of BEV 3D object detection. Knowledge Distillation (KD) is one of the most practical techniques to train efficient yet accurate models. However, BEV KD is still under-explored to the best of our knowledge. Different from image classification tasks, BEV 3D object detection approaches are more complicated and consist of several components. In this paper, we propose a unified framework named BEV-LGKD to transfer the knowledge in the teacher-student manner. However, directly applying the teacher-student paradigm to BEV features fails to achieve satisfying results due to heavy background information in RGB cameras. To solve this problem, we propose to leverage the localization advantage of LiDAR points. Specifically, we transform the LiDAR points to BEV space and generate the foreground mask and view-dependent mask for the teacher-student paradigm. It is to be noted that our method only uses LiDAR points to guide the KD between RGB models. As the quality of depth estimation is crucial for BEV perception, we further introduce depth distillation to our framework. Our unified framework is simple yet effective and achieves a significant performance boost. Code will be released.

Zhongyu Zhao, Menghang Dong, Rongyu Zhang et al.

Recent research has demonstrated that Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) in Large Language Models (LLMs) play a pivotal role in storing diverse linguistic and factual knowledge. Conventional methods frequently face challenges due to knowledge confusion stemming from their monolithic and redundant architectures, which calls for more efficient solutions with minimal computational overhead, particularly for LLMs. In this paper, we explore the FFN computation paradigm in LLMs and introduce FactorLLM, a novel approach that decomposes well-trained dense FFNs into sparse sub-networks without requiring any further modifications, while maintaining the same level of performance. Furthermore, we embed a router from the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), combined with our devised Prior-Approximate (PA) loss term that facilitates the dynamic activation of experts and knowledge adaptation, thereby accelerating computational processes and enhancing performance using minimal training data and fine-tuning steps. FactorLLM thus enables efficient knowledge factorization and activates select groups of experts specifically tailored to designated tasks, emulating the interactive functional segmentation of the human brain. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed FactorLLM which achieves comparable performance to the source model securing up to 85% model performance while obtaining over a 30% increase in inference speed. Code: https://github.com/zhenwuweihe/FactorLLM.

Jiaming Liu, Senqiao Yang, Peidong Jia et al.

Since real-world machine systems are running in non-stationary environments, Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) task is proposed to adapt the pre-trained model to continually changing target domains. Recently, existing methods mainly focus on model-based adaptation, which aims to leverage a self-training manner to extract the target domain knowledge. However, pseudo labels can be noisy and the updated model parameters are unreliable under dynamic data distributions, leading to error accumulation and catastrophic forgetting in the continual adaptation process. To tackle these challenges and maintain the model plasticity, we design a Visual Domain Adapter (ViDA) for CTTA, explicitly handling both domain-specific and domain-shared knowledge. Specifically, we first comprehensively explore the different domain representations of the adapters with trainable high-rank or low-rank embedding spaces. Then we inject ViDAs into the pre-trained model, which leverages high-rank and low-rank features to adapt the current domain distribution and maintain the continual domain-shared knowledge, respectively. To exploit the low-rank and high-rank ViDAs more effectively, we further propose a Homeostatic Knowledge Allotment (HKA) strategy, which adaptively combines different knowledge from each ViDA. Extensive experiments conducted on four widely used benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both classification and segmentation CTTA tasks. Note that, our method can be regarded as a novel transfer paradigm for large-scale models, delivering promising results in adaptation to continually changing distributions. Project page: https://sites.google.com/view/iclr2024-vida/home.

Jianing Li, Jiaming Liu, Xiaobao Wei et al. · pku

Depth estimation is essential for various important real-world applications such as autonomous driving. However, it suffers from severe performance degradation in high-velocity scenario since traditional cameras can only capture blurred images. To deal with this problem, the spike camera is designed to capture the pixel-wise luminance intensity at high frame rate. However, depth estimation with spike camera remains very challenging using traditional monocular or stereo depth estimation algorithms, which are based on the photometric consistency. In this paper, we propose a novel Uncertainty-Guided Depth Fusion (UGDF) framework to fuse the predictions of monocular and stereo depth estimation networks for spike camera. Our framework is motivated by the fact that stereo spike depth estimation achieves better results at close range while monocular spike depth estimation obtains better results at long range. Therefore, we introduce a dual-task depth estimation architecture with a joint training strategy and estimate the distributed uncertainty to fuse the monocular and stereo results. In order to demonstrate the advantage of spike depth estimation over traditional camera depth estimation, we contribute a spike-depth dataset named CitySpike20K, which contains 20K paired samples, for spike depth estimation. UGDF achieves state-of-the-art results on CitySpike20K, surpassing all monocular or stereo spike depth estimation baselines. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness and generalization of our method on CitySpike20K. To the best of our knowledge, our framework is the first dual-task fusion framework for spike camera depth estimation. Code and dataset will be released.

Mingjie Pan, Li Liu, Jiaming Liu et al.

In this technical report, we present our solution, named UniOCC, for the Vision-Centric 3D occupancy prediction track in the nuScenes Open Dataset Challenge at CVPR 2023. Existing methods for occupancy prediction primarily focus on optimizing projected features on 3D volume space using 3D occupancy labels. However, the generation process of these labels is complex and expensive (relying on 3D semantic annotations), and limited by voxel resolution, they cannot provide fine-grained spatial semantics. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Unifying Occupancy (UniOcc) prediction method, explicitly imposing spatial geometry constraint and complementing fine-grained semantic supervision through volume ray rendering. Our method significantly enhances model performance and demonstrates promising potential in reducing human annotation costs. Given the laborious nature of annotating 3D occupancy, we further introduce a Depth-aware Teacher Student (DTS) framework to enhance prediction accuracy using unlabeled data. Our solution achieves 51.27\% mIoU on the official leaderboard with single model, placing 3rd in this challenge.

Xiaowei Chi, Jiaming Liu, Ming Lu et al.

Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) 3D Object Detection is a crucial multi-view technique for autonomous driving systems. Recently, plenty of works are proposed, following a similar paradigm consisting of three essential components, i.e., camera feature extraction, BEV feature construction, and task heads. Among the three components, BEV feature construction is BEV-specific compared with 2D tasks. Existing methods aggregate the multi-view camera features to the flattened grid in order to construct the BEV feature. However, flattening the BEV space along the height dimension fails to emphasize the informative features of different heights. For example, the barrier is located at a low height while the truck is located at a high height. In this paper, we propose a novel method named BEV Slice Attention Network (BEV-SAN) for exploiting the intrinsic characteristics of different heights. Instead of flattening the BEV space, we first sample along the height dimension to build the global and local BEV slices. Then, the features of BEV slices are aggregated from the camera features and merged by the attention mechanism. Finally, we fuse the merged local and global BEV features by a transformer to generate the final feature map for task heads. The purpose of local BEV slices is to emphasize informative heights. In order to find them, we further propose a LiDAR-guided sampling strategy to leverage the statistical distribution of LiDAR to determine the heights of local slices. Compared with uniform sampling, LiDAR-guided sampling can determine more informative heights. We conduct detailed experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of BEV-SAN. Code will be released.

Shuanghao Bai, Jing Lyu, Wanqi Zhou et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models benefit from chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, but existing approaches incur high inference overhead and rely on discrete reasoning representations that mismatch continuous perception and control. We propose Latent Reasoning VLA (LaRA-VLA), a unified VLA framework that internalizes multi-modal CoT reasoning into continuous latent representations for embodied action. LaRA-VLA performs unified reasoning and prediction in latent space, eliminating explicit CoT generation at inference time and enabling efficient, action-oriented control. To realize latent embodied reasoning, we introduce a curriculum-based training paradigm that progressively transitions from explicit textual and visual CoT supervision to latent reasoning, and finally adapts latent reasoning dynamics to condition action generation. We construct two structured CoT datasets and evaluate LaRA-VLA on both simulation benchmarks and long-horizon real-robot manipulation tasks. Experimental results show that LaRA-VLA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art VLA methods while reducing inference latency by up to 90\% compared to explicit CoT-based approaches, demonstrating latent reasoning as an effective and efficient paradigm for real-time embodied control. Project Page: https://loveju1y.github.io/Latent-Reasoning-VLA/

Zixing Lei, Genjia Liu, Yuanshuo Zhang et al.

The field of Embodied AI is witnessing a rapid evolution toward general-purpose robotic systems, fueled by high-fidelity simulation and large-scale data collection. However, this scaling capability remains severely bottlenecked by a reliance on labor-intensive manual oversight from intricate reward shaping to hyperparameter tuning across heterogeneous backends. Inspired by LLMs' success in software automation and science discovery, we introduce \textsc{EmboCoach-Bench}, a benchmark evaluating the capacity of LLM agents to autonomously engineer embodied policies. Spanning 32 expert-curated RL and IL tasks, our framework posits executable code as the universal interface. We move beyond static generation to assess a dynamic closed-loop workflow, where agents leverage environment feedback to iteratively draft, debug, and optimize solutions, spanning improvements from physics-informed reward design to policy architectures such as diffusion policies. Extensive evaluations yield three critical insights: (1) autonomous agents can qualitatively surpass human-engineered baselines by 26.5\% in average success rate; (2) agentic workflow with environment feedback effectively strengthens policy development and substantially narrows the performance gap between open-source and proprietary models; and (3) agents exhibit self-correction capabilities for pathological engineering cases, successfully resurrecting task performance from near-total failures through iterative simulation-in-the-loop debugging. Ultimately, this work establishes a foundation for self-evolving embodied intelligence, accelerating the paradigm shift from labor-intensive manual tuning to scalable, autonomous engineering in embodied AI field.

Zongzheng Zhang, Jingrui Pang, Zhuo Yang et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently become a central direction in embodied AI, but current systems are restricted to either dual-gripper control or single-arm dexterous hand manipulation. While low-dimensional gripper control can often be handled with simpler methods, high-dimensional dexterous hand control benefits greatly from full end-to-end VLA learning. In this work, we introduce Dexora, the first open-source VLA system that natively targets dual-arm, dual-hand high-DoF manipulation. We design a hybrid teleoperation pipeline that decouples gross arm kinematics (captured with a custom exoskeleton backpack) from fine finger motion (markerless hand tracking via Apple Vision Pro), and that drives both a physical dual-arm dual-hand platform and an identical MuJoCo digital twin. Using that interface, we assemble a large training corpus: an embodiment-matched synthetic corpus (100K simulated trajectories, 6.5M frames) and a real-world dataset of 10K teleoperated episodes (2.92M frames). To mitigate noisy teleoperation demonstrations, we propose a data-quality-aware training recipe: an offline discriminator provides clip-level weights for diffusion-transformer policy training, down-weighting low-quality demonstrations. Empirically, Dexora outperforms competitive VLA baselines on both basic and dexterous benchmarks (e.g., average dexterous success 66.7% vs. 51.7%), attains 90% success on basic tasks, and shows robust out-of-distribution and cross-embodiment generalization. Ablations confirm the importance of real data and the discriminator for dexterity.

Yuan Zhang, Tao Huang, Jiaming Liu et al.

Knowledge distillation (KD) has been applied to various tasks successfully, and mainstream methods typically boost the student model via spatial imitation losses. However, the consecutive downsamplings induced in the spatial domain of teacher model is a type of corruption, hindering the student from analyzing what specific information needs to be imitated, which results in accuracy degradation. To better understand the underlying pattern of corrupted feature maps, we shift our attention to the frequency domain. During frequency distillation, we encounter a new challenge: the low-frequency bands convey general but minimal context, while the high are more informative but also introduce noise. Not each pixel within the frequency bands contributes equally to the performance. To address the above problem: (1) We propose the Frequency Prompt plugged into the teacher model, absorbing the semantic frequency context during finetuning. (2) During the distillation period, a pixel-wise frequency mask is generated via Frequency Prompt, to localize those pixel of interests (PoIs) in various frequency bands. Additionally, we employ a position-aware relational frequency loss for dense prediction tasks, delivering a high-order spatial enhancement to the student model. We dub our Frequency Knowledge Distillation method as FreeKD, which determines the optimal localization and extent for the frequency distillation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FreeKD not only outperforms spatial-based distillation methods consistently on dense prediction tasks (e.g., FreeKD brings 3.8 AP gains for RepPoints-R50 on COCO2017 and 4.55 mIoU gains for PSPNet-R18 on Cityscapes), but also conveys more robustness to the student. Notably, we also validate the generalization of our approach on large-scale vision models (e.g., DINO and SAM).

Zhuoyang Liu, Jiaming Liu, Jiadong Xu et al.

Vision-language-action models (VLAs) have shown generalization capabilities in robotic manipulation tasks by inheriting from vision-language models (VLMs) and learning action generation. Most VLA models focus on interpreting vision and language to generate actions, whereas robots must perceive and interact within the spatial-physical world. This gap highlights the need for a comprehensive understanding of robotic-specific multisensory information, which is crucial for achieving complex and contact-rich control. To this end, we introduce a multisensory language-action (MLA) model that collaboratively perceives heterogeneous sensory modalities and predicts future multisensory objectives to facilitate physical world modeling. Specifically, to enhance perceptual representations, we propose an encoder-free multimodal alignment scheme that innovatively repurposes the large language model itself as a perception module, directly interpreting multimodal cues by aligning 2D images, 3D point clouds, and tactile tokens through positional correspondence. To further enhance MLA's understanding of physical dynamics, we design a future multisensory generation post-training strategy that enables MLA to reason about semantic, geometric, and interaction information, providing more robust conditions for action generation. For evaluation, the MLA model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art 2D and 3D VLA methods by 12% and 24% in complex, contact-rich real-world tasks, respectively, while also demonstrating improved generalization to unseen configurations.

Peidong Jia, Jiaming Liu, Senqiao Yang et al.

The Transformer-based detectors (i.e., DETR) have demonstrated impressive performance on end-to-end object detection. However, transferring DETR to different data distributions may lead to a significant performance degradation. Existing adaptation techniques focus on model-based approaches, which aim to leverage feature alignment to narrow the distribution shift between different domains. In this study, we propose a hierarchical Prompt Domain Memory (PDM) for adapting detection transformers to different distributions. PDM comprehensively leverages the prompt memory to extract domain-specific knowledge and explicitly constructs a long-term memory space for the data distribution, which represents better domain diversity compared to existing methods. Specifically, each prompt and its corresponding distribution value are paired in the memory space, and we inject top M distribution-similar prompts into the input and multi-level embeddings of DETR. Additionally, we introduce the Prompt Memory Alignment (PMA) to reduce the discrepancy between the source and target domains by fully leveraging the domain-specific knowledge extracted from the prompt domain memory. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art domain adaptive object detection methods on three benchmarks, including scene, synthetic to real, and weather adaptation. Codes will be released.

Xingqun Qi, Jiahao Pan, Peng Li et al.

Generating vivid and emotional 3D co-speech gestures is crucial for virtual avatar animation in human-machine interaction applications. While the existing methods enable generating the gestures to follow a single emotion label, they overlook that long gesture sequence modeling with emotion transition is more practical in real scenes. In addition, the lack of large-scale available datasets with emotional transition speech and corresponding 3D human gestures also limits the addressing of this task. To fulfill this goal, we first incorporate the ChatGPT-4 and an audio inpainting approach to construct the high-fidelity emotion transition human speeches. Considering obtaining the realistic 3D pose annotations corresponding to the dynamically inpainted emotion transition audio is extremely difficult, we propose a novel weakly supervised training strategy to encourage authority gesture transitions. Specifically, to enhance the coordination of transition gestures w.r.t different emotional ones, we model the temporal association representation between two different emotional gesture sequences as style guidance and infuse it into the transition generation. We further devise an emotion mixture mechanism that provides weak supervision based on a learnable mixed emotion label for transition gestures. Last, we present a keyframe sampler to supply effective initial posture cues in long sequences, enabling us to generate diverse gestures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art models constructed by adapting single emotion-conditioned counterparts on our newly defined emotion transition task and datasets. Our code and dataset will be released on the project page: https://xingqunqi-lab.github.io/Emo-Transition-Gesture/.

Qianpu Sun, Xiaowei Chi, Yuhan Rui et al.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly catalyzing scientific automation, with multimodal large language model (MLLM) agents evolving from lab assistants into self-driving lab operators. This transition imposes stringent safety requirements on laboratory environments, where fragile glassware, hazardous substances, and high-precision laboratory equipment render planning errors or misinterpreted risks potentially irreversible. However, the safety awareness and decision-making reliability of embodied agents in such high-stakes settings remain insufficiently defined and evaluated. To bridge this gap, we introduce LABSHIELD, a realistic multi-view benchmark designed to assess MLLMs in hazard identification and safety-critical reasoning. Grounded in U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards and the Globally Harmonized System (GHS), LABSHIELD establishes a rigorous safety taxonomy spanning 164 operational tasks with diverse manipulation complexities and risk profiles. We evaluate 20 proprietary models, 9 open-source models, and 3 embodied models under a dual-track evaluation framework. Our results reveal a systematic gap between general-domain MCQ accuracy and Semi-open QA safety performance, with models exhibiting an average drop of 32.0% in professional laboratory scenarios, particularly in hazard interpretation and safety-aware planning. These findings underscore the urgent necessity for safety-centric reasoning frameworks to ensure reliable autonomous scientific experimentation in embodied laboratory contexts. The full dataset will be released soon.

Jiayi Ni, Senqiao Yang, Ran Xu et al.

Since autonomous driving systems usually face dynamic and ever-changing environments, continual test-time adaptation (CTTA) has been proposed as a strategy for transferring deployed models to continually changing target domains. However, the pursuit of long-term adaptation often introduces catastrophic forgetting and error accumulation problems, which impede the practical implementation of CTTA in the real world. Recently, existing CTTA methods mainly focus on utilizing a majority of parameters to fit target domain knowledge through self-training. Unfortunately, these approaches often amplify the challenge of error accumulation due to noisy pseudo-labels, and pose practical limitations stemming from the heavy computational costs associated with entire model updates. In this paper, we propose a distribution-aware tuning (DAT) method to make the semantic segmentation CTTA efficient and practical in real-world applications. DAT adaptively selects and updates two small groups of trainable parameters based on data distribution during the continual adaptation process, including domain-specific parameters (DSP) and task-relevant parameters (TRP). Specifically, DSP exhibits sensitivity to outputs with substantial distribution shifts, effectively mitigating the problem of error accumulation. In contrast, TRP are allocated to positions that are responsive to outputs with minor distribution shifts, which are fine-tuned to avoid the catastrophic forgetting problem. In addition, since CTTA is a temporal task, we introduce the Parameter Accumulation Update (PAU) strategy to collect the updated DSP and TRP in target domain sequences. We conduct extensive experiments on two widely-used semantic segmentation CTTA benchmarks, achieving promising performance compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.

Jiajun Cao, Xiaoan Zhang, Xiaobao Wei et al.

Vision-Language-Action models have shown great promise for autonomous driving, yet they suffer from degraded perception after unfreezing the visual encoder and struggle with accumulated instability in long-term planning. To address these challenges, we propose EvoDriveVLA-a novel collaborative perception-planning distillation framework that integrates self-anchored perceptual constraints and oracle-guided trajectory optimization. Specifically, self-anchored visual distillation leverages self-anchor teacher to deliver visual anchoring constraints, regularizing student representations via trajectory-guided key-region awareness. In parallel, oracle-guided trajectory distillation employs a future-aware oracle teacher with coarse-to-fine trajectory refinement and Monte Carlo dropout sampling to produce high-quality trajectory candidates, thereby selecting the optimal trajectory to guide the student's prediction. EvoDriveVLA achieves SOTA performance in open-loop evaluation and significantly enhances performance in closed-loop evaluation. Our code is available at: https://github.com/hey-cjj/EvoDriveVLA.

Jiaming Liu, Rongyu Zhang, Xiaoqi Li et al.

Vision-centric bird-eye-view (BEV) perception has shown promising potential in autonomous driving. Recent works mainly focus on improving efficiency or accuracy but neglect the challenges when facing environment changing, resulting in severe degradation of transfer performance. For BEV perception, we figure out the significant domain gaps existing in typical real-world cross-domain scenarios and comprehensively solve the Domain Adaption (DA) problem for multi-view 3D object detection. Since BEV perception approaches are complicated and contain several components, the domain shift accumulation on multiple geometric spaces (i.e., 2D, 3D Voxel, BEV) makes BEV DA even challenging. In this paper, we propose a Multi-space Alignment Teacher-Student (MATS) framework to ease the domain shift accumulation, which consists of a Depth-Aware Teacher (DAT) and a Geometric-space Aligned Student (GAS) model. DAT tactfully combines target lidar and reliable depth prediction to construct depth-aware information, extracting target domain-specific knowledge in Voxel and BEV feature spaces. It then transfers the sufficient domain knowledge of multiple spaces to the student model. In order to jointly alleviate the domain shift, GAS projects multi-geometric space features to a shared geometric embedding space and decreases data distribution distance between two domains. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we conduct BEV 3D object detection experiments on three cross-domain scenarios and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Zhuoyang Liu, Jiaming Liu, Hao Chen et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently shown strong generalization, with some approaches seeking to explicitly generate linguistic reasoning traces or predict future observations prior to execution. However, explicit reasoning typically incurs non-negligible inference latency, which constrains the temporal resolution required for robotic manipulation. Moreover, such reasoning is confined to the linguistic space, imposing a representational bottleneck that struggles to faithfully capture ineffable physical attributes. To mitigate these limitations, we propose LaST$_0$, a framework that enables efficient reasoning before acting through a Latent Spatio-Temporal Chain-of-Thought (CoT), capturing fine-grained physical and robotic dynamics that are often difficult to verbalize. Specifically, we introduce a token-efficient latent CoT space that models future visual dynamics, 3D structural information, and robot proprioceptive states, and further extends these representations across time to enable temporally consistent implicit reasoning trajectories. Furthermore, LaST$_0$ adopts a dual-system architecture implemented via a Mixture-of-Transformers design, where a reasoning expert conducts low-frequency latent inference and an acting expert generates high-frequency actions conditioned on robotics-oriented latent representations. To facilitate coordination, LaST$_0$ is trained with heterogeneous operation frequencies, enabling adaptive switching during deployment. Across 10 real-world tasks spanning tabletop, mobile, and dexterous hand manipulation, LaST$_0$ improves mean success rates by 13%, 14% and 14% over prior SOTA VLA methods, respectively.