Human-Machine Shared Control Approach for the Takeover of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control

Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) often requires human takeover for tasks such as exiting a freeway. Direct human takeover can pose significant risks, especially given the close-following strategy employed by CACC, which might cause drivers to feel unsafe and execute hard braking, potentially leading to collisions. This research aims to develop a CACC takeover controller that ensures a smooth transition from automated to human control. The proposed CACC takeover maneuver employs an indirect human-machine shared control approach, modeled as a Stackelberg competition where the machine acts as the leader and the human as the follower. The machine guides the human to respond in a manner that aligns with the machine's expectations, aiding in maintaining following stability. Additionally, the human reaction function is integrated into the machine's predictive control system, moving beyond a simple "prediction-planning" pipeline to enhance planning optimality. The controller has been verified to i) enable a smooth takeover maneuver of CACC; ii) ensure string stability within a specific Operational Design Domain (ODD) when human control authority is below 32.7%; iii) enhance both perceived and actual safety through machine interventions; and iv) reduce the impact on upstream traffic by up to 60%.

Non-Robust Features are Not Always Useful in One-Class Classification

The robustness of machine learning models has been questioned by the existence of adversarial examples. We examine the threat of adversarial examples in practical applications that require lightweight models for one-class classification. Building on Ilyas et al. (2019), we investigate the vulnerability of lightweight one-class classifiers to adversarial attacks and possible reasons for it. Our results show that lightweight one-class classifiers learn features that are not robust (e.g. texture) under stronger attacks. However, unlike in multi-class classification (Ilyas et al., 2019), these non-robust features are not always useful for the one-class task, suggesting that learning these unpredictive and non-robust features is an unwanted consequence of training.

EMPL: A novel Efficient Meta Prompt Learning Framework for Few-shot Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Few-shot unsupervised domain adaptation (FS-UDA) utilizes few-shot labeled source domain data to realize effective classification in unlabeled target domain. However, current FS-UDA methods are still suffer from two issues: 1) the data from different domains can not be effectively aligned by few-shot labeled data due to the large domain gaps, 2) it is unstable and time-consuming to generalize to new FS-UDA tasks.To address this issue, we put forward a novel Efficient Meta Prompt Learning Framework for FS-UDA. Within this framework, we use pre-trained CLIP model as the feature learning base model. First, we design domain-shared prompt learning vectors composed of virtual tokens, which mainly learns the meta knowledge from a large number of meta tasks to mitigate domain gaps. Secondly, we also design a task-shared prompt learning network to adaptively learn specific prompt vectors for each task, which aims to realize fast adaptation and task generalization. Thirdly, we learn a task-specific cross-domain alignment projection and a task-specific classifier with closed-form solutions for each meta task, which can efficiently adapt the model to new tasks in one step. The whole learning process is formulated as a bilevel optimization problem, and a good initialization of model parameters is learned through meta-learning. Extensive experimental study demonstrates the promising performance of our framework on benchmark datasets. Our method has the large improvement of at least 15.4% on 5-way 1-shot and 8.7% on 5-way 5-shot, compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Also, the performance of our method on all the test tasks is more stable than the other methods.

The Factuality Tax of Diversity-Intervened Text-to-Image Generation: Benchmark and Fact-Augmented Intervention

Prompt-based "diversity interventions" are commonly adopted to improve the diversity of Text-to-Image (T2I) models depicting individuals with various racial or gender traits. However, will this strategy result in nonfactual demographic distribution, especially when generating real historical figures? In this work, we propose DemOgraphic FActualIty Representation (DoFaiR), a benchmark to systematically quantify the trade-off between using diversity interventions and preserving demographic factuality in T2I models. DoFaiR consists of 756 meticulously fact-checked test instances to reveal the factuality tax of various diversity prompts through an automated evidence-supported evaluation pipeline. Experiments on DoFaiR unveil that diversity-oriented instructions increase the number of different gender and racial groups in DALLE-3's generations at the cost of historically inaccurate demographic distributions. To resolve this issue, we propose Fact-Augmented Intervention (FAI), which instructs a Large Language Model (LLM) to reflect on verbalized or retrieved factual information about gender and racial compositions of generation subjects in history, and incorporate it into the generation context of T2I models. By orienting model generations using the reflected historical truths, FAI significantly improves the demographic factuality under diversity interventions while preserving diversity.

From Efficient Multimodal Models to World Models: A Survey

Multimodal Large Models (MLMs) are becoming a significant research focus, combining powerful large language models with multimodal learning to perform complex tasks across different data modalities. This review explores the latest developments and challenges in MLMs, emphasizing their potential in achieving artificial general intelligence and as a pathway to world models. We provide an overview of key techniques such as Multimodal Chain of Thought (M-COT), Multimodal Instruction Tuning (M-IT), and Multimodal In-Context Learning (M-ICL). Additionally, we discuss both the fundamental and specific technologies of multimodal models, highlighting their applications, input/output modalities, and design characteristics. Despite significant advancements, the development of a unified multimodal model remains elusive. We discuss the integration of 3D generation and embodied intelligence to enhance world simulation capabilities and propose incorporating external rule systems for improved reasoning and decision-making. Finally, we outline future research directions to address these challenges and advance the field.

Seeking Certainty In Uncertainty: Dual-Stage Unified Framework Solving Uncertainty in Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition

The contemporary state-of-the-art of Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition (DFER) technology facilitates remarkable progress by deriving emotional mappings of facial expressions from video content, underpinned by training on voluminous datasets. Yet, the DFER datasets encompass a substantial volume of noise data. Noise arises from low-quality captures that defy logical labeling, and instances that suffer from mislabeling due to annotation bias, engendering two principal types of uncertainty: the uncertainty regarding data usability and the uncertainty concerning label reliability. Addressing the two types of uncertainty, we have meticulously crafted a two-stage framework aiming at \textbf{S}eeking \textbf{C}ertain data \textbf{I}n extensive \textbf{U}ncertain data (SCIU). This initiative aims to purge the DFER datasets of these uncertainties, thereby ensuring that only clean, verified data is employed in training processes. To mitigate the issue of low-quality samples, we introduce the Coarse-Grained Pruning (CGP) stage, which assesses sample weights and prunes those deemed unusable due to their low weight. For samples with incorrect annotations, the Fine-Grained Correction (FGC) stage evaluates prediction stability to rectify mislabeled data. Moreover, SCIU is conceived as a universally compatible, plug-and-play framework, tailored to integrate seamlessly with prevailing DFER methodologies. Rigorous experiments across prevalent DFER datasets and against numerous benchmark methods substantiates SCIU's capacity to markedly elevate performance metrics.

Suppressing Uncertainties in Degradation Estimation for Blind Super-Resolution

The problem of blind image super-resolution aims to recover high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) images with unknown degradation modes. Most existing methods model the image degradation process using blur kernels. However, this explicit modeling approach struggles to cover the complex and varied degradation processes encountered in the real world, such as high-order combinations of JPEG compression, blur, and noise. Implicit modeling for the degradation process can effectively overcome this issue, but a key challenge of implicit modeling is the lack of accurate ground truth labels for the degradation process to conduct supervised training. To overcome this limitations inherent in implicit modeling, we propose an \textbf{U}ncertainty-based degradation representation for blind \textbf{S}uper-\textbf{R}esolution framework (\textbf{USR}). By suppressing the uncertainty of local degradation representations in images, USR facilitated self-supervised learning of degradation representations. The USR consists of two components: Adaptive Uncertainty-Aware Degradation Extraction (AUDE) and a feature extraction network composed of Variable Depth Dynamic Convolution (VDDC) blocks. To extract Uncertainty-based Degradation Representation from LR images, the AUDE utilizes the Self-supervised Uncertainty Contrast module with Uncertainty Suppression Loss to suppress the inherent model uncertainty of the Degradation Extractor. Furthermore, VDDC block integrates degradation information through dynamic convolution. Rhe VDDC also employs an Adaptive Intensity Scaling operation that adaptively adjusts the degradation representation according to the network hierarchy, thereby facilitating the effective integration of degradation information. Quantitative and qualitative experiments affirm the superiority of our approach.

FaceGPT: Self-supervised Learning to Chat about 3D Human Faces

We introduce FaceGPT, a self-supervised learning framework for Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to reason about 3D human faces from images and text. Typical 3D face reconstruction methods are specialized algorithms that lack semantic reasoning capabilities. FaceGPT overcomes this limitation by embedding the parameters of a 3D morphable face model (3DMM) into the token space of a VLM, enabling the generation of 3D faces from both textual and visual inputs. FaceGPT is trained in a self-supervised manner as a model-based autoencoder from in-the-wild images. In particular, the hidden state of LLM is projected into 3DMM parameters and subsequently rendered as 2D face image to guide the self-supervised learning process via image-based reconstruction. Without relying on expensive 3D annotations of human faces, FaceGPT obtains a detailed understanding about 3D human faces, while preserving the capacity to understand general user instructions. Our experiments demonstrate that FaceGPT not only achieves high-quality 3D face reconstructions but also retains the ability for general-purpose visual instruction following. Furthermore, FaceGPT learns fully self-supervised to generate 3D faces based on complex textual inputs, which opens a new direction in human face analysis.

VIP: Versatile Image Outpainting Empowered by Multimodal Large Language Model

In this paper, we focus on resolving the problem of image outpainting, which aims to extrapolate the surrounding parts given the center contents of an image. Although recent works have achieved promising performance, the lack of versatility and customization hinders their practical applications in broader scenarios. Therefore, this work presents a novel image outpainting framework that is capable of customizing the results according to the requirement of users. First of all, we take advantage of a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that automatically extracts and organizes the corresponding textual descriptions of the masked and unmasked part of a given image. Accordingly, the obtained text prompts are introduced to endow our model with the capacity to customize the outpainting results. In addition, a special Cross-Attention module, namely Center-Total-Surrounding (CTS), is elaborately designed to enhance further the the interaction between specific space regions of the image and corresponding parts of the text prompts. Note that unlike most existing methods, our approach is very resource-efficient since it is just slightly fine-tuned on the off-the-shelf stable diffusion (SD) model rather than being trained from scratch. Finally, the experimental results on three commonly used datasets, i.e. Scenery, Building, and WikiArt, demonstrate our model significantly surpasses the SoTA methods. Moreover, versatile outpainting results are listed to show its customized ability.

OUS: Scene-Guided Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition

Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition (DFER) is crucial for affective computing but often overlooks the impact of scene context. We have identified a significant issue in current DFER tasks: human annotators typically integrate emotions from various angles, including environmental cues and body language, whereas existing DFER methods tend to consider the scene as noise that needs to be filtered out, focusing solely on facial information. We refer to this as the Rigid Cognitive Problem. The Rigid Cognitive Problem can lead to discrepancies between the cognition of annotators and models in some samples. To align more closely with the human cognitive paradigm of emotions, we propose an Overall Understanding of the Scene DFER method (OUS). OUS effectively integrates scene and facial features, combining scene-specific emotional knowledge for DFER. Extensive experiments on the two largest datasets in the DFER field, DFEW and FERV39k, demonstrate that OUS significantly outperforms existing methods. By analyzing the Rigid Cognitive Problem, OUS successfully understands the complex relationship between scene context and emotional expression, closely aligning with human emotional understanding in real-world scenarios.