InfoMatch: Entropy Neural Estimation for Semi-Supervised Image Classification

Semi-supervised image classification, leveraging pseudo supervision and consistency regularization, has demonstrated remarkable success. However, the ongoing challenge lies in fully exploiting the potential of unlabeled data. To address this, we employ information entropy neural estimation to harness the potential of unlabeled samples. Inspired by contrastive learning, the entropy is estimated by maximizing a lower bound on mutual information across different augmented views. Moreover, we theoretically analyze that the information entropy of the posterior of an image classifier is approximated by maximizing the likelihood function of the softmax predictions. Guided by these insights, we optimize our model from both perspectives to ensure that the predicted probability distribution closely aligns with the ground-truth distribution. Given the theoretical connection to information entropy, we name our method \textit{InfoMatch}. Through extensive experiments, we show its superior performance.

TOD3Cap: Towards 3D Dense Captioning in Outdoor Scenes

3D dense captioning stands as a cornerstone in achieving a comprehensive understanding of 3D scenes through natural language. It has recently witnessed remarkable achievements, particularly in indoor settings. However, the exploration of 3D dense captioning in outdoor scenes is hindered by two major challenges: 1) the \textbf{domain gap} between indoor and outdoor scenes, such as dynamics and sparse visual inputs, makes it difficult to directly adapt existing indoor methods; 2) the \textbf{lack of data} with comprehensive box-caption pair annotations specifically tailored for outdoor scenes. To this end, we introduce the new task of outdoor 3D dense captioning. As input, we assume a LiDAR point cloud and a set of RGB images captured by the panoramic camera rig. The expected output is a set of object boxes with captions. To tackle this task, we propose the TOD3Cap network, which leverages the BEV representation to generate object box proposals and integrates Relation Q-Former with LLaMA-Adapter to generate rich captions for these objects. We also introduce the TOD3Cap dataset, the largest one to our knowledge for 3D dense captioning in outdoor scenes, which contains 2.3M descriptions of 64.3K outdoor objects from 850 scenes. Notably, our TOD3Cap network can effectively localize and caption 3D objects in outdoor scenes, which outperforms baseline methods by a significant margin (+9.6 CiDEr@0.5IoU). Code, data, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/jxbbb/TOD3Cap.

DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Models

A primary hurdle of autonomous driving in urban environments is understanding complex and long-tail scenarios, such as challenging road conditions and delicate human behaviors. We introduce DriveVLM, an autonomous driving system leveraging Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for enhanced scene understanding and planning capabilities. DriveVLM integrates a unique combination of chain-of-thought (CoT) modules for scene description, scene analysis, and hierarchical planning. Furthermore, recognizing the limitations of VLMs in spatial reasoning and heavy computational requirements, we propose DriveVLM-Dual, a hybrid system that synergizes the strengths of DriveVLM with the traditional autonomous driving pipeline. DriveVLM-Dual achieves robust spatial understanding and real-time inference speed. Extensive experiments on both the nuScenes dataset and our SUP-AD dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of DriveVLM and the enhanced performance of DriveVLM-Dual, surpassing existing methods in complex and unpredictable driving conditions.

Street Gaussians for Modeling Dynamic Urban Scenes

This paper aims to tackle the problem of modeling dynamic urban street scenes from monocular videos. Recent methods extend NeRF by incorporating tracked vehicle poses to animate vehicles, enabling photo-realistic view synthesis of dynamic urban street scenes. However, significant limitations are their slow training and rendering speed, coupled with the critical need for high precision in tracked vehicle poses. We introduce Street Gaussians, a new explicit scene representation that tackles all these limitations. Specifically, the dynamic urban street is represented as a set of point clouds equipped with semantic logits and 3D Gaussians, each associated with either a foreground vehicle or the background. To model the dynamics of foreground object vehicles, each object point cloud is optimized with optimizable tracked poses, along with a dynamic spherical harmonics model for the dynamic appearance. The explicit representation allows easy composition of object vehicles and background, which in turn allows for scene editing operations and rendering at 133 FPS (1066$\times$1600 resolution) within half an hour of training. The proposed method is evaluated on multiple challenging benchmarks, including KITTI and Waymo Open datasets. Experiments show that the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all datasets. Furthermore, the proposed representation delivers performance on par with that achieved using precise ground-truth poses, despite relying only on poses from an off-the-shelf tracker. The code is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/street_gaussians/.

BEV-CLIP: Multi-modal BEV Retrieval Methodology for Complex Scene in Autonomous Driving

The demand for the retrieval of complex scene data in autonomous driving is increasing, especially as passenger vehicles have been equipped with the ability to navigate urban settings, with the imperative to address long-tail scenarios. Meanwhile, under the pre-existing two dimensional image retrieval method, some problems may arise with scene retrieval, such as lack of global feature representation and subpar text retrieval ability. To address these issues, we have proposed \textbf{BEV-CLIP}, the first multimodal Bird's-Eye View(BEV) retrieval methodology that utilizes descriptive text as an input to retrieve corresponding scenes. This methodology applies the semantic feature extraction abilities of a large language model (LLM) to facilitate zero-shot retrieval of extensive text descriptions, and incorporates semi-structured information from a knowledge graph to improve the semantic richness and variety of the language embedding. Our experiments result in 87.66% accuracy on NuScenes dataset in text-to-BEV feature retrieval. The demonstrated cases in our paper support that our retrieval method is also indicated to be effective in identifying certain long-tail corner scenes.

Self-Contrastive Graph Diffusion Network

Augmentation techniques and sampling strategies are crucial in contrastive learning, but in most existing works, augmentation techniques require careful design, and their sampling strategies can only capture a small amount of intrinsic supervision information. Additionally, the existing methods require complex designs to obtain two different representations of the data. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework called the Self-Contrastive Graph Diffusion Network (SCGDN). Our framework consists of two main components: the Attentional Module (AttM) and the Diffusion Module (DiFM). AttM aggregates higher-order structure and feature information to get an excellent embedding, while DiFM balances the state of each node in the graph through Laplacian diffusion learning and allows the cooperative evolution of adjacency and feature information in the graph. Unlike existing methodologies, SCGDN is an augmentation-free approach that avoids "sampling bias" and semantic drift, without the need for pre-training. We conduct a high-quality sampling of samples based on structure and feature information. If two nodes are neighbors, they are considered positive samples of each other. If two disconnected nodes are also unrelated on $k$NN graph, they are considered negative samples for each other. The contrastive objective reasonably uses our proposed sampling strategies, and the redundancy reduction term minimizes redundant information in the embedding and can well retain more discriminative information. In this novel framework, the graph self-contrastive learning paradigm gives expression to a powerful force. SCGDN effectively balances between preserving high-order structure information and avoiding overfitting. The results manifest that SCGDN can consistently generate outperformance over both the contrastive methods and the classical methods.

Entropy Neural Estimation for Graph Contrastive Learning

Contrastive learning on graphs aims at extracting distinguishable high-level representations of nodes. In this paper, we theoretically illustrate that the entropy of a dataset can be approximated by maximizing the lower bound of the mutual information across different views of a graph, \ie, entropy is estimated by a neural network. Based on this finding, we propose a simple yet effective subset sampling strategy to contrast pairwise representations between views of a dataset. In particular, we randomly sample nodes and edges from a given graph to build the input subset for a view. Two views are fed into a parameter-shared Siamese network to extract the high-dimensional embeddings and estimate the information entropy of the entire graph. For the learning process, we propose to optimize the network using two objectives, simultaneously. Concretely, the input of the contrastive loss function consists of positive and negative pairs. Our selection strategy of pairs is different from previous works and we present a novel strategy to enhance the representation ability of the graph encoder by selecting nodes based on cross-view similarities. We enrich the diversity of the positive and negative pairs by selecting highly similar samples and totally different data with the guidance of cross-view similarity scores, respectively. We also introduce a cross-view consistency constraint on the representations generated from the different views. This objective guarantees the learned representations are consistent across views from the perspective of the entire graph. We conduct extensive experiments on seven graph benchmarks, and the proposed approach achieves competitive performance compared to the current state-of-the-art methods. The source code will be publicly released once this paper is accepted.

Improving Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Dual-Level Siamese Structure Network

Semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SSS) is an important task that utilizes both labeled and unlabeled data to reduce expenses on labeling training examples. However, the effectiveness of SSS algorithms is limited by the difficulty of fully exploiting the potential of unlabeled data. To address this, we propose a dual-level Siamese structure network (DSSN) for pixel-wise contrastive learning. By aligning positive pairs with a pixel-wise contrastive loss using strong augmented views in both low-level image space and high-level feature space, the proposed DSSN is designed to maximize the utilization of available unlabeled data. Additionally, we introduce a novel class-aware pseudo-label selection strategy for weak-to-strong supervision, which addresses the limitations of most existing methods that do not perform selection or apply a predefined threshold for all classes. Specifically, our strategy selects the top high-confidence prediction of the weak view for each class to generate pseudo labels that supervise the strong augmented views. This strategy is capable of taking into account the class imbalance and improving the performance of long-tailed classes. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on two datasets, PASCAL VOC 2012 and Cityscapes, outperforming other SSS algorithms by a significant margin.

Curriculum Knowledge Switching for Pancreas Segmentation

Pancreas segmentation is challenging due to the small proportion and highly changeable anatomical structure. It motivates us to propose a novel segmentation framework, namely Curriculum Knowledge Switching (CKS) framework, which decomposes detecting pancreas into three phases with different difficulty extent: straightforward, difficult, and challenging. The framework switches from straightforward to challenging phases and thereby gradually learns to detect pancreas. In addition, we adopt the momentum update parameter updating mechanism during switching, ensuring the loss converges gradually when the input dataset changes. Experimental results show that different neural network backbones with the CKS framework achieved state-of-the-art performance on the NIH dataset as measured by the DSC metric.

Stationary Diffusion State Neural Estimation for Multiview Clustering

Although many graph-based clustering methods attempt to model the stationary diffusion state in their objectives, their performance limits to using a predefined graph. We argue that the estimation of the stationary diffusion state can be achieved by gradient descent over neural networks. We specifically design the Stationary Diffusion State Neural Estimation (SDSNE) to exploit multiview structural graph information for co-supervised learning. We explore how to design a graph neural network specially for unsupervised multiview learning and integrate multiple graphs into a unified consensus graph by a shared self-attentional module. The view-shared self-attentional module utilizes the graph structure to learn a view-consistent global graph. Meanwhile, instead of using auto-encoder in most unsupervised learning graph neural networks, SDSNE uses a co-supervised strategy with structure information to supervise the model learning. The co-supervised strategy as the loss function guides SDSNE in achieving the stationary state. With the help of the loss and the self-attentional module, we learn to obtain a graph in which nodes in each connected component fully connect by the same weight. Experiments on several multiview datasets demonstrate effectiveness of SDSNE in terms of six clustering evaluation metrics.