Depth Transfer: Learning to See Like a Simulator for Real-World Drone Navigation

Sim-to-real transfer is a fundamental challenge in robot reinforcement learning. Discrepancies between simulation and reality can significantly impair policy performance, especially if it receives high-dimensional inputs such as dense depth estimates from vision. We propose a novel depth transfer method based on domain adaptation to bridge the visual gap between simulated and real-world depth data. A Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is first trained to encode ground-truth depth images from simulation into a latent space, which serves as input to a reinforcement learning (RL) policy. During deployment, the encoder is refined to align stereo depth images with this latent space, enabling direct policy transfer without fine-tuning. We apply our method to the task of autonomous drone navigation through cluttered environments. Experiments in IsaacGym show that our method nearly doubles the obstacle avoidance success rate when switching from ground-truth to stereo depth input. Furthermore, we demonstrate successful transfer to the photo-realistic simulator AvoidBench using only IsaacGym-generated stereo data, achieving superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Real-world evaluations in both indoor and outdoor environments confirm the effectiveness of our approach, enabling robust and generalizable depth-based navigation across diverse domains.

MiniMax-Speech: Intrinsic Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with a Learnable Speaker Encoder

We introduce MiniMax-Speech, an autoregressive Transformer-based Text-to-Speech (TTS) model that generates high-quality speech. A key innovation is our learnable speaker encoder, which extracts timbre features from a reference audio without requiring its transcription. This enables MiniMax-Speech to produce highly expressive speech with timbre consistent with the reference in a zero-shot manner, while also supporting one-shot voice cloning with exceptionally high similarity to the reference voice. In addition, the overall quality of the synthesized audio is enhanced through the proposed Flow-VAE. Our model supports 32 languages and demonstrates excellent performance across multiple objective and subjective evaluations metrics. Notably, it achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on objective voice cloning metrics (Word Error Rate and Speaker Similarity) and has secured the top position on the public TTS Arena leaderboard. Another key strength of MiniMax-Speech, granted by the robust and disentangled representations from the speaker encoder, is its extensibility without modifying the base model, enabling various applications such as: arbitrary voice emotion control via LoRA; text to voice (T2V) by synthesizing timbre features directly from text description; and professional voice cloning (PVC) by fine-tuning timbre features with additional data. We encourage readers to visit https://minimax-ai.github.io/tts_tech_report for more examples.

CAMeL: Cross-modality Adaptive Meta-Learning for Text-based Person Retrieval

Text-based person retrieval aims to identify specific individuals within an image database using textual descriptions. Due to the high cost of annotation and privacy protection, researchers resort to synthesized data for the paradigm of pretraining and fine-tuning. However, these generated data often exhibit domain biases in both images and textual annotations, which largely compromise the scalability of the pre-trained model. Therefore, we introduce a domain-agnostic pretraining framework based on Cross-modality Adaptive Meta-Learning (CAMeL) to enhance the model generalization capability during pretraining to facilitate the subsequent downstream tasks. In particular, we develop a series of tasks that reflect the diversity and complexity of real-world scenarios, and introduce a dynamic error sample memory unit to memorize the history for errors encountered within multiple tasks. To further ensure multi-task adaptation, we also adopt an adaptive dual-speed update strategy, balancing fast adaptation to new tasks and slow weight updates for historical tasks. Albeit simple, our proposed model not only surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods on real-world benchmarks, including CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES, and RSTPReid, but also showcases robustness and scalability in handling biased synthetic images and noisy text annotations. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jahawn-Wen/CAMeL-reID.

Segmented Trajectory Optimization for Autonomous Parking in Unstructured Environments

This paper presents a Segmented Trajectory Optimization (STO) method for autonomous parking, which refines an initial trajectory into a dynamically feasible and collision-free one using an iterative SQP-based approach. STO maintains the maneuver strategy of the high-level global planner while allowing curvature discontinuities at switching points to improve maneuver efficiency. To ensure safety, a convex corridor is constructed via GJK-accelerated ellipse shrinking and expansion, serving as safety constraints in each iteration. Numerical simulations in perpendicular and reverse-angled parking scenarios demonstrate that STO enhances maneuver efficiency while ensuring safety. Moreover, computational performance confirms its practicality for real-world applications.

Contextual Preference Collaborative Measure Framework Based on Belief System

To reduce the human intervention in the preference measure process,this article proposes a preference collaborative measure framework based on an updated belief system,which is also capable of improving the accuracy and efficiency of preferen-ce measure algorithms.Firstly,the distance of rules and the average internal distance of rulesets are proposed for specifying the relationship between the rules.For discovering the most representative preferences that are common in all users,namely common preference,a algorithm based on average internal distance of ruleset,PRA algorithm,is proposed,which aims to finish the discoveryprocess with minimum information loss rate.Furthermore,the concept of Common belief is proposed to update the belief system,and the common preferences are the evidences of updated belief system.Then,under the belief system,the proposed belief degree and deviation degree are used to determine whether a rule confirms the belief system or not and classify the preference rules into two kinds(generalized or personalized),and eventually filters out Top-K interesting rules relying on belief degree and deviation degree.Based on above,a scalable interestingness calculation framework that can apply various formulas is proposed for accurately calculating interestingness in different conditions.At last,IMCos algorithm and IMCov algorithm are proposed as exemplars to verify the accuracy and efficiency of the framework by using weighted cosine similarity and correlation coefficients as belief degree.In experiments,the proposed algorithms are compared to two state-of-the-art algorithms and the results show that IMCos and IMCov outperform than the other two in most aspects.

Seeing Sarcasm Through Different Eyes: Analyzing Multimodal Sarcasm Perception in Large Vision-Language Models

With the advent of large vision-language models (LVLMs) demonstrating increasingly human-like abilities, a pivotal question emerges: do different LVLMs interpret multimodal sarcasm differently, and can a single model grasp sarcasm from multiple perspectives like humans? To explore this, we introduce an analytical framework using systematically designed prompts on existing multimodal sarcasm datasets. Evaluating 12 state-of-the-art LVLMs over 2,409 samples, we examine interpretive variations within and across models, focusing on confidence levels, alignment with dataset labels, and recognition of ambiguous "neutral" cases. Our findings reveal notable discrepancies -- across LVLMs and within the same model under varied prompts. While classification-oriented prompts yield higher internal consistency, models diverge markedly when tasked with interpretive reasoning. These results challenge binary labeling paradigms by highlighting sarcasm's subjectivity. We advocate moving beyond rigid annotation schemes toward multi-perspective, uncertainty-aware modeling, offering deeper insights into multimodal sarcasm comprehension. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/CoderChen01/LVLMSarcasmAnalysis

ACCORD: Alleviating Concept Coupling through Dependence Regularization for Text-to-Image Diffusion Personalization

Image personalization has garnered attention for its ability to customize Text-to-Image generation using only a few reference images. However, a key challenge in image personalization is the issue of conceptual coupling, where the limited number of reference images leads the model to form unwanted associations between the personalization target and other concepts. Current methods attempt to tackle this issue indirectly, leading to a suboptimal balance between text control and personalization fidelity. In this paper, we take a direct approach to the concept coupling problem through statistical analysis, revealing that it stems from two distinct sources of dependence discrepancies. We therefore propose two complementary plug-and-play loss functions: Denoising Decouple Loss and Prior Decouple loss, each designed to minimize one type of dependence discrepancy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves a superior trade-off between text control and personalization fidelity.

An Efficient Learning Method to Connect Observables

Constructing fast and accurate surrogate models is a key ingredient for making robust predictions in many topics. We introduce a new model, the Multiparameter Eigenvalue Problem (MEP) emulator. The new method connects emulators and can make predictions directly from observables to observables. We present that the MEP emulator can be trained with data from Eigenvector Continuation (EC) and Parametric Matrix Model (PMM) emulators. A simple simulation on a one-dimensional lattice confirms the performance of the MEP emulator. Using $^{28}$O as an example, we also demonstrate that the predictive probability distribution of the target observables can be easily obtained through the new emulator.

Advancing Out-of-Distribution Detection via Local Neuroplasticity

In the domain of machine learning, the assumption that training and test data share the same distribution is often violated in real-world scenarios, requiring effective out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. This paper presents a novel OOD detection method that leverages the unique local neuroplasticity property of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs). Unlike traditional multilayer perceptrons, KANs exhibit local plasticity, allowing them to preserve learned information while adapting to new tasks. Our method compares the activation patterns of a trained KAN against its untrained counterpart to detect OOD samples. We validate our approach on benchmarks from image and medical domains, demonstrating superior performance and robustness compared to state-of-the-art techniques. These results underscore the potential of KANs in enhancing the reliability of machine learning systems in diverse environments.

Traffic and Safety Rule Compliance of Humans in Diverse Driving Situations

The increasing interest in autonomous driving systems has highlighted the need for an in-depth analysis of human driving behavior in diverse scenarios. Analyzing human data is crucial for developing autonomous systems that replicate safe driving practices and ensure seamless integration into human-dominated environments. This paper presents a comparative evaluation of human compliance with traffic and safety rules across multiple trajectory prediction datasets, including Argoverse 2, nuPlan, Lyft, and DeepUrban. By defining and leveraging existing safety and behavior-related metrics, such as time to collision, adherence to speed limits, and interactions with other traffic participants, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of each datasets strengths and limitations. Our analysis focuses on the distribution of data samples, identifying noise, outliers, and undesirable behaviors exhibited by human drivers in both the training and validation sets. The results underscore the need for applying robust filtering techniques to certain datasets due to high levels of noise and the presence of such undesirable behaviors.