Causality-Aware End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Ego-Centric Joint Scene Modeling

End-to-end autonomous driving, which bypasses traditional modular pipelines by directly predicting future trajectories from sensor inputs, has recently achieved substantial progress. However, existing methods often overlook the causal inter-dependencies in ego-vehicle planning, ignoring the reciprocal relations between the ego vehicle and surrounding agents. This causal oversight leads to inconsistent and unreliable trajectory predictions, especially in interaction-critical scenarios where ego decisions and neighboring agent behaviors must be reasoned about jointly. To address this limitation, we propose CaAD, a Causality-aware end-to-end Autonomous Driving framework that captures these dependencies within a shared latent scene representation. First, we propose a ego-centric joint-causal modeling module that builds on the marginal prediction branch, and learns causal dependencies between the ego vehicle and interaction-relevant agents. Second, we employ a causality-aware policy alignment stage implemented with joint-mode embeddings to align the stochastic ego policy with planning-oriented closed-loop feedback computed from surrounding traffic and map context. On the Bench2Drive and NAVSIM benchmarks, CaAD demonstrates strong closed-loop planning performance, achieving a Driving Score of 87.53 and Success Rate of 71.81 on Bench2Drive, and a PDMS of 91.1 on NAVSIM.

SpatiO: Adaptive Test-Time Orchestration of Vision-Language Agents for Spatial Reasoning

Understanding visual scenes requires not only recognizing objects but also reasoning about their spatial relationships. Unlike general vision-language tasks, spatial reasoning requires integrating multiple inductive biases, such as 2D appearance cues, depth signals, and geometric constraints, whose reliability varies across contexts. This suggests that effective spatial reasoning requires \emph{spatial adaptability}: the ability to flexibly coordinate different reasoning strategies depending on the input. However, most existing approaches rely on a single reasoning pipeline that implicitly learns a fixed spatial prior, limiting their ability to adapt under distribution changes. Multi-agent systems offer a promising alternative by aggregating diverse reasoning trajectories, but prior attempts in spatial reasoning primarily employ homogeneous agents, restricting the diversity of inductive biases they can leverage. In this work, we introduce \textbf{\textsc{SpatiO}}, a heterogeneous multi-agent framework for spatial reasoning that coordinates multiple vision-language specialists with complementary inductive biases. To enable effective collaboration, we propose \textbf{Test-Time Orchestration (TTO)}, an optimization mechanism that dynamically evaluates and reweights agents based on their observed reliability during inference, without modifying model parameters. Extensive experiments on diverse spatial reasoning benchmarks, including 3DSRBench, STVQA-7k, CV-Bench, and Omni3D-Bench, demonstrate that \textsc{SpatiO} consistently improves spatial reasoning performance over both closed-source and open-source baselines.

Focus, Don't Prune: Identifying Instruction-Relevant Regions for Information-Rich Image Understanding

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown strong performance across various multimodal tasks by leveraging the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, processing visually complex and information-rich images, such as infographics or document layouts, requires these models to generate a large number of visual tokens, leading to significant computational overhead. To address this, we propose PinPoint, a novel two-stage framework that first identifies instruction-relevant image regions and then refines them to extract fine-grained visual features for improved reasoning and efficiency. Central to our approach is the Instruction-Region Alignment, which localizes relevant regions using both visual input and textual instructions. We further introduce new annotations that provide richer ground-truth supervision for instruction-relevant regions across challenging VQA benchmarks: InfographicVQA, MultiPageDocVQA, and SinglePageDocVQA. Experimental results show that PinPoint not only achieves superior accuracy compared to existing methods but also reduces computational overhead by minimizing irrelevant visual tokens.

ALIGN: Advanced Query Initialization with LiDAR-Image Guidance for Occlusion-Robust 3D Object Detection

Recent query-based 3D object detection methods using camera and LiDAR inputs have shown strong performance, but existing query initialization strategies,such as random sampling or BEV heatmap-based sampling, often result in inefficient query usage and reduced accuracy, particularly for occluded or crowded objects. To address this limitation, we propose ALIGN (Advanced query initialization with LiDAR and Image GuidaNce), a novel approach for occlusion-robust, object-aware query initialization. Our model consists of three key components: (i) Occlusion-aware Center Estimation (OCE), which integrates LiDAR geometry and image semantics to estimate object centers accurately (ii) Adaptive Neighbor Sampling (ANS), which generates object candidates from LiDAR clustering and supplements each object by sampling spatially and semantically aligned points around it and (iii) Dynamic Query Balancing (DQB), which adaptively balances queries between foreground and background regions. Our extensive experiments on the nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that ALIGN consistently improves performance across multiple state-of-the-art detectors, achieving gains of up to +0.9 mAP and +1.2 NDS, particularly in challenging scenes with occlusions or dense crowds. Our code will be publicly available upon publication.

Watermarking for Factuality: Guiding Vision-Language Models Toward Truth via Tri-layer Contrastive Decoding

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently shown promising results on various multimodal tasks, even achieving human-comparable performance in certain cases. Nevertheless, LVLMs remain prone to hallucinations -- they often rely heavily on a single modality or memorize training data without properly grounding their outputs. To address this, we propose a training-free, tri-layer contrastive decoding with watermarking, which proceeds in three steps: (1) select a mature layer and an amateur layer among the decoding layers, (2) identify a pivot layer using a watermark-related question to assess whether the layer is visually well-grounded, and (3) apply tri-layer contrastive decoding to generate the final output. Experiments on public benchmarks such as POPE, MME and AMBER demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in reducing hallucinations in LVLMs and generates more visually grounded responses.

SemanticControl: A Training-Free Approach for Handling Loosely Aligned Visual Conditions in ControlNet

ControlNet has enabled detailed spatial control in text-to-image diffusion models by incorporating additional visual conditions such as depth or edge maps. However, its effectiveness heavily depends on the availability of visual conditions that are precisely aligned with the generation goal specified by text prompt-a requirement that often fails in practice, especially for uncommon or imaginative scenes. For example, generating an image of a cat cooking in a specific pose may be infeasible due to the lack of suitable visual conditions. In contrast, structurally similar cues can often be found in more common settings-for instance, poses of humans cooking are widely available and can serve as rough visual guides. Unfortunately, existing ControlNet models struggle to use such loosely aligned visual conditions, often resulting in low text fidelity or visual artifacts. To address this limitation, we propose SemanticControl, a training-free method for effectively leveraging misaligned but semantically relevant visual conditions. Our approach adaptively suppresses the influence of the visual condition where it conflicts with the prompt, while strengthening guidance from the text. The key idea is to first run an auxiliary denoising process using a surrogate prompt aligned with the visual condition (e.g., "a human playing guitar" for a human pose condition) to extract informative attention masks, and then utilize these masks during the denoising of the actual target prompt (e.g., cat playing guitar). Experimental results demonstrate that our method improves performance under loosely aligned conditions across various conditions, including depth maps, edge maps, and human skeletons, outperforming existing baselines. Our code is available at https://mung3477.github.io/semantic-control.

LRSLAM: Low-rank Representation of Signed Distance Fields in Dense Visual SLAM System

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) has been crucial across various domains, including autonomous driving, mobile robotics, and mixed reality. Dense visual SLAM, leveraging RGB-D camera systems, offers advantages but faces challenges in achieving real-time performance, robustness, and scalability for large-scale scenes. Recent approaches utilizing neural implicit scene representations show promise but suffer from high computational costs and memory requirements. ESLAM introduced a plane-based tensor decomposition but still struggled with memory growth. Addressing these challenges, we propose a more efficient visual SLAM model, called LRSLAM, utilizing low-rank tensor decomposition methods. Our approach, leveraging the Six-axis and CP decompositions, achieves better convergence rates, memory efficiency, and reconstruction/localization quality than existing state-of-the-art approaches. Evaluation across diverse indoor RGB-D datasets demonstrates LRSLAM's superior performance in terms of parameter efficiency, processing time, and accuracy, retaining reconstruction and localization quality. Our code will be publicly available upon publication.

Mitigating Trade-off: Stream and Query-guided Aggregation for Efficient and Effective 3D Occupancy Prediction

3D occupancy prediction has emerged as a key perception task for autonomous driving, as it reconstructs 3D environments to provide a comprehensive scene understanding. Recent studies focus on integrating spatiotemporal information obtained from past observations to improve prediction accuracy, using a multi-frame fusion approach that processes multiple past frames together. However, these methods struggle with a trade-off between efficiency and accuracy, which significantly limits their practicality. To mitigate this trade-off, we propose StreamOcc, a novel framework that aggregates spatio-temporal information in a stream-based manner. StreamOcc consists of two key components: (i) Stream-based Voxel Aggregation, which effectively accumulates past observations while minimizing computational costs, and (ii) Query-guided Aggregation, which recurrently aggregates instance-level features of dynamic objects into corresponding voxel features, refining fine-grained details of dynamic objects. Experiments on the Occ3D-nuScenes dataset show that StreamOcc achieves state-of-the-art performance in real-time settings, while reducing memory usage by more than 50% compared to previous methods.

3D Occupancy Prediction with Low-Resolution Queries via Prototype-aware View Transformation

The resolution of voxel queries significantly influences the quality of view transformation in camera-based 3D occupancy prediction. However, computational constraints and the practical necessity for real-time deployment require smaller query resolutions, which inevitably leads to an information loss. Therefore, it is essential to encode and preserve rich visual details within limited query sizes while ensuring a comprehensive representation of 3D occupancy. To this end, we introduce ProtoOcc, a novel occupancy network that leverages prototypes of clustered image segments in view transformation to enhance low-resolution context. In particular, the mapping of 2D prototypes onto 3D voxel queries encodes high-level visual geometries and complements the loss of spatial information from reduced query resolutions. Additionally, we design a multi-perspective decoding strategy to efficiently disentangle the densely compressed visual cues into a high-dimensional 3D occupancy scene. Experimental results on both Occ3D and SemanticKITTI benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, showing clear improvements over the baselines. More importantly, ProtoOcc achieves competitive performance against the baselines even with 75\% reduced voxel resolution.

GUIDE-CoT: Goal-driven and User-Informed Dynamic Estimation for Pedestrian Trajectory using Chain-of-Thought

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown impressive results in reasoning tasks, their application to pedestrian trajectory prediction remains challenging due to two key limitations: insufficient use of visual information and the difficulty of predicting entire trajectories. To address these challenges, we propose Goal-driven and User-Informed Dynamic Estimation for pedestrian trajectory using Chain-of-Thought (GUIDE-CoT). Our approach integrates two innovative modules: (1) a goal-oriented visual prompt, which enhances goal prediction accuracy combining visual prompts with a pretrained visual encoder, and (2) a chain-of-thought (CoT) LLM for trajectory generation, which generates realistic trajectories toward the predicted goal. Moreover, our method introduces controllable trajectory generation, allowing for flexible and user-guided modifications to the predicted paths. Through extensive experiments on the ETH/UCY benchmark datasets, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering both high accuracy and greater adaptability in pedestrian trajectory prediction. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ai-kmu/GUIDE-CoT.