AVOID: The Adverse Visual Conditions Dataset with Obstacles for Driving Scene Understanding

Understanding road scenes for visual perception remains crucial for intelligent self-driving cars. In particular, it is desirable to detect unexpected small road hazards reliably in real-time, especially under varying adverse conditions (e.g., weather and daylight). However, existing road driving datasets provide large-scale images acquired in either normal or adverse scenarios only, and often do not contain the road obstacles captured in the same visual domain as for the other classes. To address this, we introduce a new dataset called AVOID, the Adverse Visual Conditions Dataset, for real-time obstacle detection collected in a simulated environment. AVOID consists of a large set of unexpected road obstacles located along each path captured under various weather and time conditions. Each image is coupled with the corresponding semantic and depth maps, raw and semantic LiDAR data, and waypoints, thereby supporting most visual perception tasks. We benchmark the results on high-performing real-time networks for the obstacle detection task, and also propose and conduct ablation studies using a comprehensive multi-task network for semantic segmentation, depth and waypoint prediction tasks.

Exploring Syn-to-Real Domain Adaptation for Military Target Detection

Object detection is one of the key target tasks of interest in the context of civil and military applications. In particular, the real-world deployment of target detection methods is pivotal in the decision-making process during military command and reconnaissance. However, current domain adaptive object detection algorithms consider adapting one domain to another similar one only within the scope of natural or autonomous driving scenes. Since military domains often deal with a mixed variety of environments, detecting objects from multiple varying target domains poses a greater challenge. Several studies for armored military target detection have made use of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data due to its robustness to all weather, long range, and high-resolution characteristics. Nevertheless, the costs of SAR data acquisition and processing are still much higher than those of the conventional RGB camera, which is a more affordable alternative with significantly lower data processing time. Furthermore, the lack of military target detection datasets limits the use of such a low-cost approach. To mitigate these issues, we propose to generate RGB-based synthetic data using a photorealistic visual tool, Unreal Engine, for military target detection in a cross-domain setting. To this end, we conducted synthetic-to-real transfer experiments by training our synthetic dataset and validating on our web-collected real military target datasets. We benchmark the state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods distinguished by the degree of supervision on our proposed train-val dataset pair, and find that current methods using minimal hints on the image (e.g., object class) achieve a substantial improvement over unsupervised or semi-supervised DA methods. From these observations, we recognize the current challenges that remain to be overcome.

Task-oriented Learnable Diffusion Timesteps for Universal Few-shot Learning of Dense Tasks

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models have brought tremendous advances in generative tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance thus far. Current diffusion model-based applications exploit the power of learned visual representations from multistep forward-backward Markovian processes for single-task prediction tasks by attaching a task-specific decoder. However, the heuristic selection of diffusion timestep features still heavily relies on empirical intuition, often leading to sub-optimal performance biased towards certain tasks. To alleviate this constraint, we investigate the significance of versatile diffusion timestep features by adaptively selecting timesteps best suited for the few-shot dense prediction task, evaluated on an arbitrary unseen task. To this end, we propose two modules: Task-aware Timestep Selection (TTS) to select ideal diffusion timesteps based on timestep-wise losses and similarity scores, and Timestep Feature Consolidation (TFC) to consolidate the selected timestep features to improve the dense predictive performance in a few-shot setting. Accompanied by our parameter-efficient fine-tuning adapter, our framework effectively achieves superiority in dense prediction performance given only a few support queries. We empirically validate our learnable timestep consolidation method on the large-scale challenging Taskonomy dataset for dense prediction, particularly for practical universal and few-shot learning scenarios.

Generative Active Learning for Long-tail Trajectory Prediction via Controllable Diffusion Model

While data-driven trajectory prediction has enhanced the reliability of autonomous driving systems, it still struggles with rarely observed long-tail scenarios. Prior works addressed this by modifying model architectures, such as using hypernetworks. In contrast, we propose refining the training process to unlock each model's potential without altering its structure. We introduce Generative Active Learning for Trajectory prediction (GALTraj), the first method to successfully deploy generative active learning into trajectory prediction. It actively identifies rare tail samples where the model fails and augments these samples with a controllable diffusion model during training. In our framework, generating scenarios that are diverse, realistic, and preserve tail-case characteristics is paramount. Accordingly, we design a tail-aware generation method that applies tailored diffusion guidance to generate trajectories that both capture rare behaviors and respect traffic rules. Unlike prior simulation methods focused solely on scenario diversity, GALTraj is the first to show how simulator-driven augmentation benefits long-tail learning in trajectory prediction. Experiments on multiple trajectory datasets (WOMD, Argoverse2) with popular backbones (QCNet, MTR) confirm that our method significantly boosts performance on tail samples and also enhances accuracy on head samples.

Robust Adverse Weather Removal via Spectral-based Spatial Grouping

Adverse weather conditions cause diverse and complex degradation patterns, driving the development of All-in-One (AiO) models. However, recent AiO solutions still struggle to capture diverse degradations, since global filtering methods like direct operations on the frequency domain fail to handle highly variable and localized distortions. To address these issue, we propose Spectral-based Spatial Grouping Transformer (SSGformer), a novel approach that leverages spectral decomposition and group-wise attention for multi-weather image restoration. SSGformer decomposes images into high-frequency edge features using conventional edge detection and low-frequency information via Singular Value Decomposition. We utilize multi-head linear attention to effectively model the relationship between these features. The fused features are integrated with the input to generate a grouping-mask that clusters regions based on the spatial similarity and image texture. To fully leverage this mask, we introduce a group-wise attention mechanism, enabling robust adverse weather removal and ensuring consistent performance across diverse weather conditions. We also propose a Spatial Grouping Transformer Block that uses both channel attention and spatial attention, effectively balancing feature-wise relationships and spatial dependencies. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our approach, validating its effectiveness in handling the varied and intricate adverse weather degradations.

From Sharp to Blur: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for 2D Human Pose Estimation Under Extreme Motion Blur Using Event Cameras

Human pose estimation is critical for applications such as rehabilitation, sports analytics, and AR/VR systems. However, rapid motion and low-light conditions often introduce motion blur, significantly degrading pose estimation due to the domain gap between sharp and blurred images. Most datasets assume stable conditions, making models trained on sharp images struggle in blurred environments. To address this, we introduce a novel domain adaptation approach that leverages event cameras, which capture high temporal resolution motion data and are inherently robust to motion blur. Using event-based augmentation, we generate motion-aware blurred images, effectively bridging the domain gap between sharp and blurred domains without requiring paired annotations. Additionally, we develop a student-teacher framework that iteratively refines pseudo-labels, leveraging mutual uncertainty masking to eliminate incorrect labels and enable more effective learning. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms conventional domain-adaptive human pose estimation methods, achieving robust pose estimation under motion blur without requiring annotations in the target domain. Our findings highlight the potential of event cameras as a scalable and effective solution for domain adaptation in real-world motion blur environments. Our project codes are available at https://github.com/kmax2001/EvSharp2Blur.

Non-differentiable Reward Optimization for Diffusion-based Autonomous Motion Planning

Safe and effective motion planning is crucial for autonomous robots. Diffusion models excel at capturing complex agent interactions, a fundamental aspect of decision-making in dynamic environments. Recent studies have successfully applied diffusion models to motion planning, demonstrating their competence in handling complex scenarios and accurately predicting multi-modal future trajectories. Despite their effectiveness, diffusion models have limitations in training objectives, as they approximate data distributions rather than explicitly capturing the underlying decision-making dynamics. However, the crux of motion planning lies in non-differentiable downstream objectives, such as safety (collision avoidance) and effectiveness (goal-reaching), which conventional learning algorithms cannot directly optimize. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning-based training scheme for diffusion motion planning models, enabling them to effectively learn non-differentiable objectives that explicitly measure safety and effectiveness. Specifically, we introduce a reward-weighted dynamic thresholding algorithm to shape a dense reward signal, facilitating more effective training and outperforming models trained with differentiable objectives. State-of-the-art performance on pedestrian datasets (CrowdNav, ETH-UCY) compared to various baselines demonstrates the versatility of our approach for safe and effective motion planning.

Resolving Token-Space Gradient Conflicts: Token Space Manipulation for Transformer-Based Multi-Task Learning

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) enables multiple tasks to be learned within a shared network, but differences in objectives across tasks can cause negative transfer, where the learning of one task degrades another task's performance. While pre-trained transformers significantly improve MTL performance, their fixed network capacity and rigid structure limit adaptability. Previous dynamic network architectures attempt to address this but are inefficient as they directly convert shared parameters into task-specific ones. We propose Dynamic Token Modulation and Expansion (DTME-MTL), a framework applicable to any transformer-based MTL architecture. DTME-MTL enhances adaptability and reduces overfitting by identifying gradient conflicts in token space and applying adaptive solutions based on conflict type. Unlike prior methods that mitigate negative transfer by duplicating network parameters, DTME-MTL operates entirely in token space, enabling efficient adaptation without excessive parameter growth. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DTME-MTL consistently improves multi-task performance with minimal computational overhead, offering a scalable and effective solution for enhancing transformer-based MTL models.

Synchronizing Task Behavior: Aligning Multiple Tasks during Test-Time Training

Generalizing neural networks to unseen target domains is a significant challenge in real-world deployments. Test-time training (TTT) addresses this by using an auxiliary self-supervised task to reduce the domain gap caused by distribution shifts between the source and target. However, we find that when models are required to perform multiple tasks under domain shifts, conventional TTT methods suffer from unsynchronized task behavior, where the adaptation steps needed for optimal performance in one task may not align with the requirements of other tasks. To address this, we propose a novel TTT approach called Synchronizing Tasks for Test-time Training (S4T), which enables the concurrent handling of multiple tasks. The core idea behind S4T is that predicting task relations across domain shifts is key to synchronizing tasks during test time. To validate our approach, we apply S4T to conventional multi-task benchmarks, integrating it with traditional TTT protocols. Our empirical results show that S4T outperforms state-of-the-art TTT methods across various benchmarks.

Multi-modal Knowledge Distillation-based Human Trajectory Forecasting

Pedestrian trajectory forecasting is crucial in various applications such as autonomous driving and mobile robot navigation. In such applications, camera-based perception enables the extraction of additional modalities (human pose, text) to enhance prediction accuracy. Indeed, we find that textual descriptions play a crucial role in integrating additional modalities into a unified understanding. However, online extraction of text requires the use of VLM, which may not be feasible for resource-constrained systems. To address this challenge, we propose a multi-modal knowledge distillation framework: a student model with limited modality is distilled from a teacher model trained with full range of modalities. The comprehensive knowledge of a teacher model trained with trajectory, human pose, and text is distilled into a student model using only trajectory or human pose as a sole supplement. In doing so, we separately distill the core locomotion insights from intra-agent multi-modality and inter-agent interaction. Our generalizable framework is validated with two state-of-the-art models across three datasets on both ego-view (JRDB, SIT) and BEV-view (ETH/UCY) setups, utilizing both annotated and VLM-generated text captions. Distilled student models show consistent improvement in all prediction metrics for both full and instantaneous observations, improving up to ~13%. The code is available at https://github.com/Jaewoo97/KDTF.