Reliable Multi-Modal Object Re-Identification via Modality-Aware Graph Reasoning

Multi-modal data provides abundant and diverse object information, crucial for effective modal interactions in Re-Identification (ReID) tasks. However, existing approaches often overlook the quality variations in local features and fail to fully leverage the complementary information across modalities, particularly in the case of low-quality features. In this paper, we propose to address this issue by leveraging a novel graph reasoning model, termed the Modality-aware Graph Reasoning Network (MGRNet). Specifically, we first construct modality-aware graphs to enhance the extraction of fine-grained local details by effectively capturing and modeling the relationships between patches. Subsequently, the selective graph nodes swap operation is employed to alleviate the adverse effects of low-quality local features by considering both local and global information, enhancing the representation of discriminative information. Finally, the swapped modality-aware graphs are fed into the local-aware graph reasoning module, which propagates multi-modal information to yield a reliable feature representation. Another advantage of the proposed graph reasoning approach is its ability to reconstruct missing modal information by exploiting inherent structural relationships, thereby minimizing disparities between different modalities. Experimental results on four benchmarks (RGBNT201, Market1501-MM, RGBNT100, MSVR310) indicate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-modal object ReID. The code for our method will be available upon acceptance.

Adversarial Attack for RGB-Event based Visual Object Tracking

Visual object tracking is a crucial research topic in the fields of computer vision and multi-modal fusion. Among various approaches, robust visual tracking that combines RGB frames with Event streams has attracted increasing attention from researchers. While striving for high accuracy and efficiency in tracking, it is also important to explore how to effectively conduct adversarial attacks and defenses on RGB-Event stream tracking algorithms, yet research in this area remains relatively scarce. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose a cross-modal adversarial attack algorithm for RGB-Event visual tracking. Because of the diverse representations of Event streams, and given that Event voxels and frames are more commonly used, this paper will focus on these two representations for an in-depth study. Specifically, for the RGB-Event voxel, we first optimize the perturbation by adversarial loss to generate RGB frame adversarial examples. For discrete Event voxel representations, we propose a two-step attack strategy, more in detail, we first inject Event voxels into the target region as initialized adversarial examples, then, conduct a gradient-guided optimization by perturbing the spatial location of the Event voxels. For the RGB-Event frame based tracking, we optimize the cross-modal universal perturbation by integrating the gradient information from multimodal data. We evaluate the proposed approach against attacks on three widely used RGB-Event Tracking datasets, i.e., COESOT, FE108, and VisEvent. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly reduces the performance of the tracker across numerous datasets in both unimodal and multimodal scenarios. The source code will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/Adversarial_Attack_Defense

CM3AE: A Unified RGB Frame and Event-Voxel/-Frame Pre-training Framework

Event cameras have attracted increasing attention in recent years due to their advantages in high dynamic range, high temporal resolution, low power consumption, and low latency. Some researchers have begun exploring pre-training directly on event data. Nevertheless, these efforts often fail to establish strong connections with RGB frames, limiting their applicability in multi-modal fusion scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a novel CM3AE pre-training framework for the RGB-Event perception. This framework accepts multi-modalities/views of data as input, including RGB images, event images, and event voxels, providing robust support for both event-based and RGB-event fusion based downstream tasks. Specifically, we design a multi-modal fusion reconstruction module that reconstructs the original image from fused multi-modal features, explicitly enhancing the model's ability to aggregate cross-modal complementary information. Additionally, we employ a multi-modal contrastive learning strategy to align cross-modal feature representations in a shared latent space, which effectively enhances the model's capability for multi-modal understanding and capturing global dependencies. We construct a large-scale dataset containing 2,535,759 RGB-Event data pairs for the pre-training. Extensive experiments on five downstream tasks fully demonstrated the effectiveness of CM3AE. Source code and pre-trained models will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/CM3AE.

Multimodal Spatio-temporal Graph Learning for Alignment-free RGBT Video Object Detection

RGB-Thermal Video Object Detection (RGBT VOD) can address the limitation of traditional RGB-based VOD in challenging lighting conditions, making it more practical and effective in many applications. However, similar to most RGBT fusion tasks, it still mainly relies on manually aligned multimodal image pairs. In this paper, we propose a novel Multimodal Spatio-temporal Graph learning Network (MSGNet) for alignment-free RGBT VOD problem by leveraging the robust graph representation learning model. Specifically, we first design an Adaptive Partitioning Layer (APL) to estimate the corresponding regions of the Thermal image within the RGB image (high-resolution), achieving a preliminary inexact alignment. Then, we introduce the Spatial Sparse Graph Learning Module (S-SGLM) which employs a sparse information passing mechanism on the estimated inexact alignment to achieve reliable information interaction between different modalities. Moreover, to fully exploit the temporal cues for RGBT VOD problem, we introduce Hybrid Structured Temporal Modeling (HSTM), which involves a Temporal Sparse Graph Learning Module (T-SGLM) and Temporal Star Block (TSB). T-SGLM aims to filter out some redundant information between adjacent frames by employing the sparse aggregation mechanism on the temporal graph. Meanwhile, TSB is dedicated to achieving the complementary learning of local spatial relationships. Extensive comparative experiments conducted on both the aligned dataset VT-VOD50 and the unaligned dataset UVT-VOD2024 demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method. Our project will be made available on our website for free public access.

RGB-Event based Pedestrian Attribute Recognition: A Benchmark Dataset and An Asymmetric RWKV Fusion Framework

Existing pedestrian attribute recognition methods are generally developed based on RGB frame cameras. However, these approaches are constrained by the limitations of RGB cameras, such as sensitivity to lighting conditions and motion blur, which hinder their performance. Furthermore, current attribute recognition primarily focuses on analyzing pedestrians' external appearance and clothing, lacking an exploration of emotional dimensions. In this paper, we revisit these issues and propose a novel multi-modal RGB-Event attribute recognition task by drawing inspiration from the advantages of event cameras in low-light, high-speed, and low-power consumption. Specifically, we introduce the first large-scale multi-modal pedestrian attribute recognition dataset, termed EventPAR, comprising 100K paired RGB-Event samples that cover 50 attributes related to both appearance and six human emotions, diverse scenes, and various seasons. By retraining and evaluating mainstream PAR models on this dataset, we establish a comprehensive benchmark and provide a solid foundation for future research in terms of data and algorithmic baselines. In addition, we propose a novel RWKV-based multi-modal pedestrian attribute recognition framework, featuring an RWKV visual encoder and an asymmetric RWKV fusion module. Extensive experiments are conducted on our proposed dataset as well as two simulated datasets (MARS-Attribute and DukeMTMC-VID-Attribute), achieving state-of-the-art results. The source code and dataset will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenPAR

Human Activity Recognition using RGB-Event based Sensors: A Multi-modal Heat Conduction Model and A Benchmark Dataset

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) primarily relied on traditional RGB cameras to achieve high-performance activity recognition. However, the challenging factors in real-world scenarios, such as insufficient lighting and rapid movements, inevitably degrade the performance of RGB cameras. To address these challenges, biologically inspired event cameras offer a promising solution to overcome the limitations of traditional RGB cameras. In this work, we rethink human activity recognition by combining the RGB and event cameras. The first contribution is the proposed large-scale multi-modal RGB-Event human activity recognition benchmark dataset, termed HARDVS 2.0, which bridges the dataset gaps. It contains 300 categories of everyday real-world actions with a total of 107,646 paired videos covering various challenging scenarios. Inspired by the physics-informed heat conduction model, we propose a novel multi-modal heat conduction operation framework for effective activity recognition, termed MMHCO-HAR. More in detail, given the RGB frames and event streams, we first extract the feature embeddings using a stem network. Then, multi-modal Heat Conduction blocks are designed to fuse the dual features, the key module of which is the multi-modal Heat Conduction Operation layer. We integrate RGB and event embeddings through a multi-modal DCT-IDCT layer while adaptively incorporating the thermal conductivity coefficient via FVEs into this module. After that, we propose an adaptive fusion module based on a policy routing strategy for high-performance classification. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently performs well, validating its effectiveness and robustness. The source code and benchmark dataset will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/HARDVS/tree/HARDVSv2

An Adaptive Proximal Inexact Gradient Framework and Its Application to Per-Antenna Constrained Joint Beamforming and Compression Design

In this paper, we propose an adaptive proximal inexact gradient (APIG) framework for solving a class of nonsmooth composite optimization problems involving function and gradient errors. Unlike existing inexact proximal gradient methods, the proposed framework introduces a new line search condition that jointly adapts to function and gradient errors, enabling adaptive stepsize selection while maintaining theoretical guarantees. Specifically, we prove that the proposed framework achieves an $\epsilon$-stationary point within $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-2})$ iterations for nonconvex objectives and an $\epsilon$-optimal solution within $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-1})$ iterations for convex cases, matching the best-known complexity in this context. We then custom-apply the APIG framework to an important signal processing problem: the joint beamforming and compression problem (JBCP) with per-antenna power constraints (PAPCs) in cooperative cellular networks. This customized application requires careful exploitation of the problem's special structure such as the tightness of the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) and the differentiability of the dual. Numerical experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our custom-application over state-of-the-art benchmarks for the JBCP.

AlphaDrive: Unleashing the Power of VLMs in Autonomous Driving via Reinforcement Learning and Reasoning

OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek R1 achieve or even surpass human expert-level performance in complex domains like mathematics and science, with reinforcement learning (RL) and reasoning playing a crucial role. In autonomous driving, recent end-to-end models have greatly improved planning performance but still struggle with long-tailed problems due to limited common sense and reasoning abilities. Some studies integrate vision-language models (VLMs) into autonomous driving, but they typically rely on pre-trained models with simple supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on driving data, without further exploration of training strategies or optimizations specifically tailored for planning. In this paper, we propose AlphaDrive, a RL and reasoning framework for VLMs in autonomous driving. AlphaDrive introduces four GRPO-based RL rewards tailored for planning and employs a two-stage planning reasoning training strategy that combines SFT with RL. As a result, AlphaDrive significantly improves both planning performance and training efficiency compared to using only SFT or without reasoning. Moreover, we are also excited to discover that, following RL training, AlphaDrive exhibits some emergent multimodal planning capabilities, which is critical for improving driving safety and efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, AlphaDrive is the first to integrate GRPO-based RL with planning reasoning into autonomous driving. Code will be released to facilitate future research.

Sign Language Translation using Frame and Event Stream: Benchmark Dataset and Algorithms

Accurate sign language understanding serves as a crucial communication channel for individuals with disabilities. Current sign language translation algorithms predominantly rely on RGB frames, which may be limited by fixed frame rates, variable lighting conditions, and motion blur caused by rapid hand movements. Inspired by the recent successful application of event cameras in other fields, we propose to leverage event streams to assist RGB cameras in capturing gesture data, addressing the various challenges mentioned above. Specifically, we first collect a large-scale RGB-Event sign language translation dataset using the DVS346 camera, termed VECSL, which contains 15,676 RGB-Event samples, 15,191 glosses, and covers 2,568 Chinese characters. These samples were gathered across a diverse range of indoor and outdoor environments, capturing multiple viewing angles, varying light intensities, and different camera motions. Due to the absence of benchmark algorithms for comparison in this new task, we retrained and evaluated multiple state-of-the-art SLT algorithms, and believe that this benchmark can effectively support subsequent related research. Additionally, we propose a novel RGB-Event sign language translation framework (i.e., M$^2$-SLT) that incorporates fine-grained micro-sign and coarse-grained macro-sign retrieval, achieving state-of-the-art results on the proposed dataset. Both the source code and dataset will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenESL.

GoalFlow: Goal-Driven Flow Matching for Multimodal Trajectories Generation in End-to-End Autonomous Driving

We propose GoalFlow, an end-to-end autonomous driving method for generating high-quality multimodal trajectories. In autonomous driving scenarios, there is rarely a single suitable trajectory. Recent methods have increasingly focused on modeling multimodal trajectory distributions. However, they suffer from trajectory selection complexity and reduced trajectory quality due to high trajectory divergence and inconsistencies between guidance and scene information. To address these issues, we introduce GoalFlow, a novel method that effectively constrains the generative process to produce high-quality, multimodal trajectories. To resolve the trajectory divergence problem inherent in diffusion-based methods, GoalFlow constrains the generated trajectories by introducing a goal point. GoalFlow establishes a novel scoring mechanism that selects the most appropriate goal point from the candidate points based on scene information. Furthermore, GoalFlow employs an efficient generative method, Flow Matching, to generate multimodal trajectories, and incorporates a refined scoring mechanism to select the optimal trajectory from the candidates. Our experimental results, validated on the Navsim\cite{Dauner2024_navsim}, demonstrate that GoalFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering robust multimodal trajectories for autonomous driving. GoalFlow achieved PDMS of 90.3, significantly surpassing other methods. Compared with other diffusion-policy-based methods, our approach requires only a single denoising step to obtain excellent performance. The code is available at https://github.com/YvanYin/GoalFlow.