ViSpec: Accelerating Vision-Language Models with Vision-Aware Speculative DecodingJialiang Kang, Han Shu, Wenshuo Li et al.
Speculative decoding is a widely adopted technique for accelerating inference in large language models (LLMs), yet its application to vision-language models (VLMs) remains underexplored, with existing methods achieving only modest speedups (<1.5x). This gap is increasingly significant as multimodal capabilities become central to large-scale models. We hypothesize that large VLMs can effectively filter redundant image information layer by layer without compromising textual comprehension, whereas smaller draft models struggle to do so. To address this, we introduce Vision-Aware Speculative Decoding (ViSpec), a novel framework tailored for VLMs. ViSpec employs a lightweight vision adaptor module to compress image tokens into a compact representation, which is seamlessly integrated into the draft model's attention mechanism while preserving original image positional information. Additionally, we extract a global feature vector for each input image and augment all subsequent text tokens with this feature to enhance multimodal coherence. To overcome the scarcity of multimodal datasets with long assistant responses, we curate a specialized training dataset by repurposing existing datasets and generating extended outputs using the target VLM with modified prompts. Our training strategy mitigates the risk of the draft model exploiting direct access to the target model's hidden states, which could otherwise lead to shortcut learning when training solely on target model outputs. Extensive experiments validate ViSpec, achieving, to our knowledge, the first substantial speedup in VLM speculative decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/KangJialiang/ViSpec.
ExCP: Extreme LLM Checkpoint Compression via Weight-Momentum Joint ShrinkingWenshuo Li, Xinghao Chen, Han Shu et al.
Large language models (LLM) have recently attracted significant attention in the field of artificial intelligence. However, the training process of these models poses significant challenges in terms of computational and storage capacities, thus compressing checkpoints has become an urgent problem. In this paper, we propose a novel Extreme Checkpoint Compression (ExCP) framework, which significantly reduces the required storage of training checkpoints while achieving nearly lossless performance. We first calculate the residuals of adjacent checkpoints to obtain the essential but sparse information for higher compression ratio. To further excavate the redundancy parameters in checkpoints, we then propose a weight-momentum joint shrinking method to utilize another important information during the model optimization, i.e., momentum. In particular, we exploit the information of both model and optimizer to discard as many parameters as possible while preserving critical information to ensure optimal performance. Furthermore, we utilize non-uniform quantization to further compress the storage of checkpoints. We extensively evaluate our proposed ExCP framework on several models ranging from 410M to 7B parameters and demonstrate significant storage reduction while maintaining strong performance. For instance, we achieve approximately $70\times$ compression for the Pythia-410M model, with the final performance being as accurate as the original model on various downstream tasks. Codes will be available at https://github.com/Gaffey/ExCP.
4.1RODec 4, 2024
QuadricsReg: Large-Scale Point Cloud Registration using Quadric PrimitivesJi Wu, Huai Yu, Shu Han et al.
In the realm of large-scale point cloud registration, designing a compact symbolic representation is crucial for efficiently processing vast amounts of data, ensuring registration robustness against significant viewpoint variations and occlusions. This paper introduces a novel point cloud registration method, i.e., QuadricsReg, which leverages concise quadrics primitives to represent scenes and utilizes their geometric characteristics to establish correspondences for 6-DoF transformation estimation. As a symbolic feature, the quadric representation fully captures the primary geometric characteristics of scenes, which can efficiently handle the complexity of large-scale point clouds. The intrinsic characteristics of quadrics, such as types and scales, are employed to initialize correspondences. Then we build a multi-level compatibility graph set to find the correspondences using the maximum clique on the geometric consistency between quadrics. Finally, we estimate the 6-DoF transformation using the quadric correspondences, which is further optimized based on the quadric degeneracy-aware distance in a factor graph, ensuring high registration accuracy and robustness against degenerate structures. We test on 5 public datasets and the self-collected heterogeneous dataset across different LiDAR sensors and robot platforms. The exceptional registration success rates and minimal registration errors demonstrate the effectiveness of QuadricsReg in large-scale point cloud registration scenarios. Furthermore, the real-world registration testing on our self-collected heterogeneous dataset shows the robustness and generalization ability of QuadricsReg on different LiDAR sensors and robot platforms. The codes and demos will be released at \url{https://levenberg.github.io/QuadricsReg}.
5.7ROApr 2, 2025
UniCalib: Targetless LiDAR-Camera Calibration via Probabilistic Flow on Unified Depth RepresentationsShu Han, Xubo Zhu, Ji Wu et al.
Precise LiDAR-camera calibration is crucial for integrating these two sensors into robotic systems to achieve robust perception. In applications like autonomous driving, online targetless calibration enables a prompt sensor misalignment correction from mechanical vibrations without extra targets. However, existing methods exhibit limitations in effectively extracting consistent features from LiDAR and camera data and fail to prioritize salient regions, compromising cross-modal alignment robustness. To address these issues, we propose DF-Calib, a LiDAR-camera calibration method that reformulates calibration as an intra-modality depth flow estimation problem. DF-Calib estimates a dense depth map from the camera image and completes the sparse LiDAR projected depth map, using a shared feature encoder to extract consistent depth-to-depth features, effectively bridging the 2D-3D cross-modal gap. Additionally, we introduce a reliability map to prioritize valid pixels and propose a perceptually weighted sparse flow loss to enhance depth flow estimation. Experimental results across multiple datasets validate its accuracy and generalization,with DF-Calib achieving a mean translation error of 0.635cm and rotation error of 0.045 degrees on the KITTI dataset.
3.7CVApr 19, 2021
Coarse-to-Fine Searching for Efficient Generative Adversarial NetworksJiahao Wang, Han Shu, Weihao Xia et al.
This paper studies the neural architecture search (NAS) problem for developing efficient generator networks. Compared with deep models for visual recognition tasks, generative adversarial network (GAN) are usually designed to conduct various complex image generation. We first discover an intact search space of generator networks including three dimensionalities, i.e., path, operator, channel for fully excavating the network performance. To reduce the huge search cost, we explore a coarse-to-fine search strategy which divides the overall search process into three sub-optimization problems accordingly. In addition, a fair supernet training approach is utilized to ensure that all sub-networks can be updated fairly and stably. Experiments results on benchmarks show that we can provide generator networks with better image quality and lower computational costs over the state-of-the-art methods. For example, with our method, it takes only about 8 GPU hours on the entire edges-to-shoes dataset to get a 2.56 MB model with a 24.13 FID score and 10 GPU hours on the entire Urban100 dataset to get a 1.49 MB model with a 24.94 PSNR score.