WARM-3D: A Weakly-Supervised Sim2Real Domain Adaptation Framework for Roadside Monocular 3D Object Detection

Existing roadside perception systems are limited by the absence of publicly available, large-scale, high-quality 3D datasets. Exploring the use of cost-effective, extensive synthetic datasets offers a viable solution to tackle this challenge and enhance the performance of roadside monocular 3D detection. In this study, we introduce the TUMTraf Synthetic Dataset, offering a diverse and substantial collection of high-quality 3D data to augment scarce real-world datasets. Besides, we present WARM-3D, a concise yet effective framework to aid the Sim2Real domain transfer for roadside monocular 3D detection. Our method leverages cheap synthetic datasets and 2D labels from an off-the-shelf 2D detector for weak supervision. We show that WARM-3D significantly enhances performance, achieving a +12.40% increase in mAP 3D over the baseline with only pseudo-2D supervision. With 2D GT as weak labels, WARM-3D even reaches performance close to the Oracle baseline. Moreover, WARM-3D improves the ability of 3D detectors to unseen sample recognition across various real-world environments, highlighting its potential for practical applications.

Take A Step Back: Rethinking the Two Stages in Visual Reasoning

Visual reasoning, as a prominent research area, plays a crucial role in AI by facilitating concept formation and interaction with the world. However, current works are usually carried out separately on small datasets thus lacking generalization ability. Through rigorous evaluation of diverse benchmarks, we demonstrate the shortcomings of existing ad-hoc methods in achieving cross-domain reasoning and their tendency to data bias fitting. In this paper, we revisit visual reasoning with a two-stage perspective: (1) symbolization and (2) logical reasoning given symbols or their representations. We find that the reasoning stage is better at generalization than symbolization. Thus, it is more efficient to implement symbolization via separated encoders for different data domains while using a shared reasoner. Given our findings, we establish design principles for visual reasoning frameworks following the separated symbolization and shared reasoning. The proposed two-stage framework achieves impressive generalization ability on various visual reasoning tasks, including puzzles, physical prediction, and visual question answering (VQA), encompassing both 2D and 3D modalities. We believe our insights will pave the way for generalizable visual reasoning.

MovieDreamer: Hierarchical Generation for Coherent Long Visual Sequence

Recent advancements in video generation have primarily leveraged diffusion models for short-duration content. However, these approaches often fall short in modeling complex narratives and maintaining character consistency over extended periods, which is essential for long-form video production like movies. We propose MovieDreamer, a novel hierarchical framework that integrates the strengths of autoregressive models with diffusion-based rendering to pioneer long-duration video generation with intricate plot progressions and high visual fidelity. Our approach utilizes autoregressive models for global narrative coherence, predicting sequences of visual tokens that are subsequently transformed into high-quality video frames through diffusion rendering. This method is akin to traditional movie production processes, where complex stories are factorized down into manageable scene capturing. Further, we employ a multimodal script that enriches scene descriptions with detailed character information and visual style, enhancing continuity and character identity across scenes. We present extensive experiments across various movie genres, demonstrating that our approach not only achieves superior visual and narrative quality but also effectively extends the duration of generated content significantly beyond current capabilities. Homepage: https://aim-uofa.github.io/MovieDreamer/.

Look Within, Why LLMs Hallucinate: A Causal Perspective

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) is a milestone in generative artificial intelligence, achieving significant success in text comprehension and generation tasks. Despite the tremendous success of LLMs in many downstream tasks, they suffer from severe hallucination problems, posing significant challenges to the practical applications of LLMs. Most of the works about LLMs' hallucinations focus on data quality. Self-attention is a core module in transformer-based LLMs, while its potential relationship with LLMs' hallucination has been hardly investigated. To fill this gap, we study this problem from a causal perspective. We propose a method to intervene in LLMs' self-attention layers and maintain their structures and sizes intact. Specifically, we disable different self-attention layers in several popular open-source LLMs and then compare their degrees of hallucination with the original ones. We evaluate the intervened LLMs on hallucination assessment benchmarks and conclude that disabling some specific self-attention layers in the front or tail of the LLMs can alleviate hallucination issues. The study paves a new way for understanding and mitigating LLMs' hallucinations.

A Transformer variant for multi-step forecasting of water level and hydrometeorological sensitivity analysis based on explainable artificial intelligence technology

Understanding the combined influences of meteorological and hydrological factors on water level and flood events is essential, particularly in today's changing climate environments. Transformer, as one kind of the cutting-edge deep learning methods, offers an effective approach to model intricate nonlinear processes, enables the extraction of key features and water level predictions. EXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods play important roles in enhancing the understandings of how different factors impact water level. In this study, we propose a Transformer variant by integrating sparse attention mechanism and introducing nonlinear output layer for the decoder module. The variant model is utilized for multi-step forecasting of water level, by considering meteorological and hydrological factors simultaneously. It is shown that the variant model outperforms traditional Transformer across different lead times with respect to various evaluation metrics. The sensitivity analyses based on XAI technology demonstrate the significant influence of meteorological factors on water level evolution, in which temperature is shown to be the most dominant meteorological factor. Therefore, incorporating both meteorological and hydrological factors is necessary for reliable hydrological prediction and flood prevention. In the meantime, XAI technology provides insights into certain predictions, which is beneficial for understanding the prediction results and evaluating the reasonability.

GraphRelate3D: Context-Dependent 3D Object Detection with Inter-Object Relationship Graphs

Accurate and effective 3D object detection is critical for ensuring the driving safety of autonomous vehicles. Recently, state-of-the-art two-stage 3D object detectors have exhibited promising performance. However, these methods refine proposals individually, ignoring the rich contextual information in the object relationships between the neighbor proposals. In this study, we introduce an object relation module, consisting of a graph generator and a graph neural network (GNN), to learn the spatial information from certain patterns to improve 3D object detection. Specifically, we create an inter-object relationship graph based on proposals in a frame via the graph generator to connect each proposal with its neighbor proposals. Afterward, the GNN module extracts edge features from the generated graph and iteratively refines proposal features with the captured edge features. Ultimately, we leverage the refined features as input to the detection head to obtain detection results. Our approach improves upon the baseline PV-RCNN on the KITTI validation set for the car class across easy, moderate, and hard difficulty levels by 0.82%, 0.74%, and 0.58%, respectively. Additionally, our method outperforms the baseline by more than 1% under the moderate and hard levels BEV AP on the test server.

PointCompress3D -- A Point Cloud Compression Framework for Roadside LiDARs in Intelligent Transportation Systems

In the context of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), efficient data compression is crucial for managing large-scale point cloud data acquired by roadside LiDAR sensors. The demand for efficient storage, streaming, and real-time object detection capabilities for point cloud data is substantial. This work introduces PointCompress3D, a novel point cloud compression framework tailored specifically for roadside LiDARs. Our framework addresses the challenges of compressing high-resolution point clouds while maintaining accuracy and compatibility with roadside LiDAR sensors. We adapt, extend, integrate, and evaluate three cutting-edge compression methods using our real-world-based TUMTraf dataset family. We achieve a frame rate of 10 FPS while keeping compression sizes below 105 Kb, a reduction of 50 times, and maintaining object detection performance on par with the original data. In extensive experiments and ablation studies, we finally achieved a PSNR d2 of 94.46 and a BPP of 6.54 on our dataset. Future work includes the deployment on the live system. The code is available on our project website: https://pointcompress3d.github.io.

Diffusion Models Trained with Large Data Are Transferable Visual Models

We show that, simply initializing image understanding models using a pre-trained UNet (or transformer) of diffusion models, it is possible to achieve remarkable transferable performance on fundamental vision perception tasks using a moderate amount of target data (even synthetic data only), including monocular depth, surface normal, image segmentation, matting, human pose estimation, among virtually many others. Previous works have adapted diffusion models for various perception tasks, often reformulating these tasks as generation processes to align with the diffusion process. In sharp contrast, we demonstrate that fine-tuning these models with minimal adjustments can be a more effective alternative, offering the advantages of being embarrassingly simple and significantly faster. As the backbone network of Stable Diffusion models is trained on giant datasets comprising billions of images, we observe very robust generalization capabilities of the diffusion backbone. Experimental results showcase the remarkable transferability of the backbone of diffusion models across diverse tasks and real-world datasets.

A Survey on Autonomous Driving Datasets: Data Statistic, Annotation, and Outlook

Autonomous driving has rapidly developed and shown promising performance with recent advances in hardware and deep learning methods. High-quality datasets are fundamental for developing reliable autonomous driving algorithms. Previous dataset surveys tried to review the datasets but either focused on a limited number or lacked detailed investigation of the characters of datasets. To this end, we present an exhaustive study of over 200 autonomous driving datasets from multiple perspectives, including sensor modalities, data size, tasks, and contextual conditions. We introduce a novel metric to evaluate the impact of each dataset, which can also be a guide for establishing new datasets. We further analyze the annotation process and quality of datasets. Additionally, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the data distribution of several vital datasets. Finally, we discuss the development trend of the future autonomous driving datasets.

Vision Language Models in Autonomous Driving and Intelligent Transportation Systems

The applications of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in the fields of Autonomous Driving (AD) and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have attracted widespread attention due to their outstanding performance and the ability to leverage Large Language Models (LLMs). By integrating language data, the vehicles, and transportation systems are able to deeply understand real-world environments, improving driving safety and efficiency. In this work, we present a comprehensive survey of the advances in language models in this domain, encompassing current models and datasets. Additionally, we explore the potential applications and emerging research directions. Finally, we thoroughly discuss the challenges and research gap. The paper aims to provide researchers with the current work and future trends of VLMs in AD and ITS.