Finetuning Pre-trained Model with Limited Data for LiDAR-based 3D Object Detection by Bridging Domain Gaps

LiDAR-based 3D object detectors have been largely utilized in various applications, including autonomous vehicles or mobile robots. However, LiDAR-based detectors often fail to adapt well to target domains with different sensor configurations (e.g., types of sensors, spatial resolution, or FOVs) and location shifts. Collecting and annotating datasets in a new setup is commonly required to reduce such gaps, but it is often expensive and time-consuming. Recent studies suggest that pre-trained backbones can be learned in a self-supervised manner with large-scale unlabeled LiDAR frames. However, despite their expressive representations, they remain challenging to generalize well without substantial amounts of data from the target domain. Thus, we propose a novel method, called Domain Adaptive Distill-Tuning (DADT), to adapt a pre-trained model with limited target data (approximately 100 LiDAR frames), retaining its representation power and preventing it from overfitting. Specifically, we use regularizers to align object-level and context-level representations between the pre-trained and finetuned models in a teacher-student architecture. Our experiments with driving benchmarks, i.e., Waymo Open dataset and KITTI, confirm that our method effectively finetunes a pre-trained model, achieving significant gains in accuracy.

ENTP: Encoder-only Next Token Prediction

Next-token prediction models have predominantly relied on decoder-only Transformers with causal attention, driven by the common belief that causal attention is essential to prevent "cheating" by masking future tokens. We challenge this widely accepted notion and argue that this design choice is about efficiency rather than necessity. While decoder-only Transformers are still a good choice for practical reasons, they are not the only viable option. In this work, we introduce Encoder-only Next Token Prediction (ENTP). We explore the differences between ENTP and decoder-only Transformers in expressive power and complexity, highlighting potential advantages of ENTP. We introduce the Triplet-Counting task and show, both theoretically and experimentally, that while ENTP can perform this task easily, a decoder-only Transformer cannot. Finally, we empirically demonstrate ENTP's superior performance across various realistic tasks, such as length generalization and in-context learning.

DeepClair: Utilizing Market Forecasts for Effective Portfolio Selection

Utilizing market forecasts is pivotal in optimizing portfolio selection strategies. We introduce DeepClair, a novel framework for portfolio selection. DeepClair leverages a transformer-based time-series forecasting model to predict market trends, facilitating more informed and adaptable portfolio decisions. To integrate the forecasting model into a deep reinforcement learning-driven portfolio selection framework, we introduced a two-step strategy: first, pre-training the time-series model on market data, followed by fine-tuning the portfolio selection architecture using this model. Additionally, we investigated the optimization technique, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), to enhance the pre-trained forecasting model for fine-tuning in investment scenarios. This work bridges market forecasting and portfolio selection, facilitating the advancement of investment strategies.

VisionTrap: Vision-Augmented Trajectory Prediction Guided by Textual Descriptions

Predicting future trajectories for other road agents is an essential task for autonomous vehicles. Established trajectory prediction methods primarily use agent tracks generated by a detection and tracking system and HD map as inputs. In this work, we propose a novel method that also incorporates visual input from surround-view cameras, allowing the model to utilize visual cues such as human gazes and gestures, road conditions, vehicle turn signals, etc, which are typically hidden from the model in prior methods. Furthermore, we use textual descriptions generated by a Vision-Language Model (VLM) and refined by a Large Language Model (LLM) as supervision during training to guide the model on what to learn from the input data. Despite using these extra inputs, our method achieves a latency of 53 ms, making it feasible for real-time processing, which is significantly faster than that of previous single-agent prediction methods with similar performance. Our experiments show that both the visual inputs and the textual descriptions contribute to improvements in trajectory prediction performance, and our qualitative analysis highlights how the model is able to exploit these additional inputs. Lastly, in this work we create and release the nuScenes-Text dataset, which augments the established nuScenes dataset with rich textual annotations for every scene, demonstrating the positive impact of utilizing VLM on trajectory prediction. Our project page is at https://moonseokha.github.io/VisionTrap/

Learning Temporal Cues by Predicting Objects Move for Multi-camera 3D Object Detection

In autonomous driving and robotics, there is a growing interest in utilizing short-term historical data to enhance multi-camera 3D object detection, leveraging the continuous and correlated nature of input video streams. Recent work has focused on spatially aligning BEV-based features over timesteps. However, this is often limited as its gain does not scale well with long-term past observations. To address this, we advocate for supervising a model to predict objects' poses given past observations, thus explicitly guiding to learn objects' temporal cues. To this end, we propose a model called DAP (Detection After Prediction), consisting of a two-branch network: (i) a branch responsible for forecasting the current objects' poses given past observations and (ii) another branch that detects objects based on the current and past observations. The features predicting the current objects from branch (i) is fused into branch (ii) to transfer predictive knowledge. We conduct extensive experiments with the large-scale nuScenes datasets, and we observe that utilizing such predictive information significantly improves the overall detection performance. Our model can be used plug-and-play, showing consistent performance gain.

Just Add $100 More: Augmenting NeRF-based Pseudo-LiDAR Point Cloud for Resolving Class-imbalance Problem

Typical LiDAR-based 3D object detection models are trained in a supervised manner with real-world data collection, which is often imbalanced over classes (or long-tailed). To deal with it, augmenting minority-class examples by sampling ground truth (GT) LiDAR points from a database and pasting them into a scene of interest is often used, but challenges still remain: inflexibility in locating GT samples and limited sample diversity. In this work, we propose to leverage pseudo-LiDAR point clouds generated (at a low cost) from videos capturing a surround view of miniatures or real-world objects of minor classes. Our method, called Pseudo Ground Truth Augmentation (PGT-Aug), consists of three main steps: (i) volumetric 3D instance reconstruction using a 2D-to-3D view synthesis model, (ii) object-level domain alignment with LiDAR intensity estimation and (iii) a hybrid context-aware placement method from ground and map information. We demonstrate the superiority and generality of our method through performance improvements in extensive experiments conducted on three popular benchmarks, i.e., nuScenes, KITTI, and Lyft, especially for the datasets with large domain gaps captured by different LiDAR configurations. Our code and data will be publicly available upon publication.

CMDA: Cross-Modal and Domain Adversarial Adaptation for LiDAR-Based 3D Object Detection

Recent LiDAR-based 3D Object Detection (3DOD) methods show promising results, but they often do not generalize well to target domains outside the source (or training) data distribution. To reduce such domain gaps and thus to make 3DOD models more generalizable, we introduce a novel unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) method, called CMDA, which (i) leverages visual semantic cues from an image modality (i.e., camera images) as an effective semantic bridge to close the domain gap in the cross-modal Bird's Eye View (BEV) representations. Further, (ii) we also introduce a self-training-based learning strategy, wherein a model is adversarially trained to generate domain-invariant features, which disrupt the discrimination of whether a feature instance comes from a source or an unseen target domain. Overall, our CMDA framework guides the 3DOD model to generate highly informative and domain-adaptive features for novel data distributions. In our extensive experiments with large-scale benchmarks, such as nuScenes, Waymo, and KITTI, those mentioned above provide significant performance gains for UDA tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Mitigating the Linguistic Gap with Phonemic Representations for Robust Multilingual Language Understanding

Approaches to improving multilingual language understanding often require multiple languages during the training phase, rely on complicated training techniques, and -- importantly -- struggle with significant performance gaps between high-resource and low-resource languages. We hypothesize that the performance gaps between languages are affected by linguistic gaps between those languages and provide a novel solution for robust multilingual language modeling by employing phonemic representations (specifically, using phonemes as input tokens to LMs rather than subwords). We present quantitative evidence from three cross-lingual tasks that demonstrate the effectiveness of phonemic representation, which is further justified by a theoretical analysis of the cross-lingual performance gap.

Relaxed Contrastive Learning for Federated Learning

We propose a novel contrastive learning framework to effectively address the challenges of data heterogeneity in federated learning. We first analyze the inconsistency of gradient updates across clients during local training and establish its dependence on the distribution of feature representations, leading to the derivation of the supervised contrastive learning (SCL) objective to mitigate local deviations. In addition, we show that a na\"ive adoption of SCL in federated learning leads to representation collapse, resulting in slow convergence and limited performance gains. To address this issue, we introduce a relaxed contrastive learning loss that imposes a divergence penalty on excessively similar sample pairs within each class. This strategy prevents collapsed representations and enhances feature transferability, facilitating collaborative training and leading to significant performance improvements. Our framework outperforms all existing federated learning approaches by huge margins on the standard benchmarks through extensive experimental results.

MTVG : Multi-text Video Generation with Text-to-Video Models

Recently, video generation has attracted massive attention and yielded noticeable outcomes. Concerning the characteristics of video, multi-text conditioning incorporating sequential events is necessary for next-step video generation. In this work, we propose a novel multi-text video generation~(MTVG) by directly utilizing a pre-trained diffusion-based text-to-video~(T2V) generation model without additional fine-tuning. To generate consecutive video segments, visual consistency generated by distinct prompts is necessary with diverse variations, such as motion and content-related transitions. Our proposed MTVG includes Dynamic Noise and Last Frame Aware Inversion which reinitialize the noise latent to preserve visual coherence between videos of different prompts and prevent repetitive motion or contents. Furthermore, we present Structure Guiding Sampling to maintain the global appearance across the frames in a single video clip, where we leverage iterative latent updates across the preceding frame. Additionally, our Prompt Generator allows for arbitrary format of text conditions consisting of diverse events. As a result, our extensive experiments, including diverse transitions of descriptions, demonstrate that our proposed methods show superior generated outputs in terms of semantically coherent and temporally seamless video.Video examples are available in our project page: https://kuai-lab.github.io/mtvg-page.