Cuong The Pham

Quang P. M. Pham, Khoi T. N. Nguyen, Nhi H. Doan et al.

Efficient path planning in robotics, particularly within large-scale, complex environments, remains a significant hurdle. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning capabilities, their high computational cost and limited adaptability hinder real-time deployment on edge devices. We present SmallPlan - a novel framework leveraging LLMs as teacher models to train lightweight Small Language Models (SLMs) for high-level path planning tasks. In SmallPlan, the SLMs provide optimal action sequences to navigate across scene graphs that compactly represent full-scaled 3D scenes. The SLMs are trained in a simulation-powered, interleaved manner with LLM-guided supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). This strategy not only enables SLMs to successfully complete navigation tasks but also makes them aware of important factors like distance travel, providing more efficient path planning. Through experiments, we demonstrate that the fine-tuned SLMs perform competitively with larger models like GPT-4o on sequential path planning, without suffering from hallucination and overfitting. SmallPlan is resource-efficient, making it well-suited for edge-device deployment and advancing practical autonomous robotics. Our source code is available here: https://github.com/quangpham2006/SmallPlan

Cuong Pham, Van-Anh Nguyen, Trung Le et al.

Knowledge distillation is an attractive approach for learning compact deep neural networks, which learns a lightweight student model by distilling knowledge from a complex teacher model. Attention-based knowledge distillation is a specific form of intermediate feature-based knowledge distillation that uses attention mechanisms to encourage the student to better mimic the teacher. However, most of the previous attention-based distillation approaches perform attention in the spatial domain, which primarily affects local regions in the input image. This may not be sufficient when we need to capture the broader context or global information necessary for effective knowledge transfer. In frequency domain, since each frequency is determined from all pixels of the image in spatial domain, it can contain global information about the image. Inspired by the benefits of the frequency domain, we propose a novel module that functions as an attention mechanism in the frequency domain. The module consists of a learnable global filter that can adjust the frequencies of student's features under the guidance of the teacher's features, which encourages the student's features to have patterns similar to the teacher's features. We then propose an enhanced knowledge review-based distillation model by leveraging the proposed frequency attention module. The extensive experiments with various teacher and student architectures on image classification and object detection benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms other knowledge distillation methods.

Viet Nguyen, Anh Nguyen, Trung Dao et al.

The escalating demand for real-time image synthesis has driven significant advancements in one-step diffusion models, which inherently offer expedited generation speeds compared to traditional multi-step methods. However, this enhanced efficiency is frequently accompanied by a compromise in the controllability of image attributes. While negative prompting, typically implemented via classifier-free guidance (CFG), has proven effective for fine-grained control in multi-step models, its application to one-step generators remains largely unaddressed. Due to the lack of iterative refinement, as in multi-step diffusion, directly applying CFG to one-step generation leads to blending artifacts and diminished output quality. To fill this gap, we introduce \textbf{N}egative-\textbf{A}way \textbf{S}teer \textbf{A}ttention (NASA), an efficient method that integrates negative prompts into one-step diffusion models. NASA operates within the intermediate representation space by leveraging cross-attention mechanisms to suppress undesired visual attributes. This strategy avoids the blending artifacts inherent in output-space guidance and achieves high efficiency, incurring only a minimal 1.89\% increase in FLOPs compared to the computational doubling of CFG. Furthermore, NASA can be seamlessly integrated into existing timestep distillation frameworks, enhancing the student's output quality. Experimental results demonstrate that NASA substantially improves controllability and output quality, achieving an HPSv2 score of \textbf{31.21}, setting a new state-of-the-art benchmark for one-step diffusion models.