Structured prototype regularization for synthetic-to-real driving scene parsing

Driving scene parsing is critical for autonomous vehicles to operate reliably in complex real-world traffic environments. To reduce the reliance on costly pixel-level annotations, synthetic datasets with automatically generated labels have become a popular alternative. However, models trained on synthetic data often perform poorly when applied to real-world scenes due to the synthetic-to-real domain gap. Despite the success of unsupervised domain adaptation in narrowing this gap, most existing methods mainly focus on global feature alignment while overlooking the semantic structure of the feature space. As a result, semantic relations among classes are insufficiently modeled, limiting the model's ability to generalize. To address these challenges, this study introduces a novel unsupervised domain adaptation framework that explicitly regularizes semantic feature structures to significantly enhance driving scene parsing performance in real-world scenarios. Specifically, the proposed method enforces inter-class separation and intra-class compactness by leveraging class-specific prototypes, thereby enhancing the discriminability and structural coherence of feature clusters. An entropy-based noise filtering strategy improves the reliability of pseudo labels, while a pixel-level attention mechanism further refines feature alignment. Extensive experiments on representative benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods. These results underscore the importance of preserving semantic structure for robust synthetic-to-real adaptation in driving scene parsing tasks.

Revealing Combinatorial Reasoning of GNNs via Graph Concept Bottleneck Layer

Despite their success in various domains, the growing dependence on GNNs raises a critical concern about the nature of the combinatorial reasoning underlying their predictions, which is often hidden within their black-box architectures. Addressing this challenge requires understanding how GNNs translate topological patterns into logical rules. However, current works only uncover the hard logical rules over graph concepts, which cannot quantify the contribution of each concept to prediction. Moreover, they are post-hoc interpretable methods that generate explanations after model training and may not accurately reflect the true combinatorial reasoning of GNNs, since they approximate it with a surrogate. In this work, we develop a graph concept bottleneck layer that can be integrated into any GNN architectures to guide them to predict the selected discriminative global graph concepts. The predicted concept scores are further projected to class labels by a sparse linear layer. It enforces the combinatorial reasoning of GNNs' predictions to fit the soft logical rule over graph concepts and thus can quantify the contribution of each concept. To further improve the quality of the concept bottleneck, we treat concepts as "graph words" and graphs as "graph sentences", and leverage language models to learn graph concept embeddings. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that our method GCBMs achieve state-of-the-art performance both in classification and interpretability.

Two-Stream Interactive Joint Learning of Scene Parsing and Geometric Vision Tasks

Inspired by the human visual system, which operates on two parallel yet interactive streams for contextual and spatial understanding, this article presents Two Interactive Streams (TwInS), a novel bio-inspired joint learning framework capable of simultaneously performing scene parsing and geometric vision tasks. TwInS adopts a unified, general-purpose architecture in which multi-level contextual features from the scene parsing stream are infused into the geometric vision stream to guide its iterative refinement. In the reverse direction, decoded geometric features are projected into the contextual feature space for selective heterogeneous feature fusion via a novel cross-task adapter, which leverages rich cross-view geometric cues to enhance scene parsing. To eliminate the dependence on costly human-annotated correspondence ground truth, TwInS is further equipped with a tailored semi-supervised training strategy, which unleashes the potential of large-scale multi-view data and enables continuous self-evolution without requiring ground-truth correspondences. Extensive experiments conducted on three public datasets validate the effectiveness of TwInS's core components and demonstrate its superior performance over existing state-of-the-art approaches. The source code will be made publicly available upon publication.

Rebenchmarking Unsupervised Monocular 3D Occupancy Prediction

Inferring the 3D structure from a single image, particularly in occluded regions, remains a fundamental yet unsolved challenge in vision-centric autonomous driving. Existing unsupervised approaches typically train a neural radiance field and treat the network outputs as occupancy probabilities during evaluation, overlooking the inconsistency between training and evaluation protocols. Moreover, the prevalent use of 2D ground truth fails to reveal the inherent ambiguity in occluded regions caused by insufficient geometric constraints. To address these issues, this paper presents a reformulated benchmark for unsupervised monocular 3D occupancy prediction. We first interpret the variables involved in the volume rendering process and identify the most physically consistent representation of the occupancy probability. Building on these analyses, we improve existing evaluation protocols by aligning the newly identified representation with voxel-wise 3D occupancy ground truth, thereby enabling unsupervised methods to be evaluated in a manner consistent with that of supervised approaches. Additionally, to impose explicit constraints in occluded regions, we introduce an occlusion-aware polarization mechanism that incorporates multi-view visual cues to enhance discrimination between occupied and free spaces in these regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach not only significantly outperforms existing unsupervised approaches but also matches the performance of supervised ones. Our source code and evaluation protocol will be made available upon publication.

SMV-EAR: Bring Spatiotemporal Multi-View Representation Learning into Efficient Event-Based Action Recognition

Event cameras action recognition (EAR) offers compelling privacy-protecting and efficiency advantages, where temporal motion dynamics is of great importance. Existing spatiotemporal multi-view representation learning (SMVRL) methods for event-based object recognition (EOR) offer promising solutions by projecting H-W-T events along spatial axis H and W, yet are limited by its translation-variant spatial binning representation and naive early concatenation fusion architecture. This paper reexamines the key SMVRL design stages for EAR and propose: (i) a principled spatiotemporal multi-view representation through translation-invariant dense conversion of sparse events, (ii) a dual-branch, dynamic fusion architecture that models sample-wise complementarity between motion features from different views, and (iii) a bio-inspired temporal warping augmentation that mimics speed variability of real-world human actions. On three challenging EAR datasets of HARDVS, DailyDVS-200 and THU-EACT-50-CHL, we show +7.0%, +10.7%, and +10.2% Top-1 accuracy gains over existing SMVRL EOR method with surprising 30.1% reduced parameters and 35.7% lower computations, establishing our framework as a novel and powerful EAR paradigm.

DST-Calib: A Dual-Path, Self-Supervised, Target-Free LiDAR-Camera Extrinsic Calibration Network

LiDAR-camera extrinsic calibration is essential for multi-modal data fusion in robotic perception systems. However, existing approaches typically rely on handcrafted calibration targets (e.g., checkerboards) or specific, static scene types, limiting their adaptability and deployment in real-world autonomous and robotic applications. This article presents the first self-supervised LiDAR-camera extrinsic calibration network that operates in an online fashion and eliminates the need for specific calibration targets. We first identify a significant generalization degradation problem in prior methods, caused by the conventional single-sided data augmentation strategy. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel double-sided data augmentation technique that generates multi-perspective camera views using estimated depth maps, thereby enhancing robustness and diversity during training. Built upon this augmentation strategy, we design a dual-path, self-supervised calibration framework that reduces the dependence on high-precision ground truth labels and supports fully adaptive online calibration. Furthermore, to improve cross-modal feature association, we replace the traditional dual-branch feature extraction design with a difference map construction process that explicitly correlates LiDAR and camera features. This not only enhances calibration accuracy but also reduces model complexity. Extensive experiments conducted on five public benchmark datasets, as well as our own recorded dataset, demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing approaches in terms of generalizability.

SemanticStitch: Enhancing Image Coherence through Foreground-Aware Seam Carving

Image stitching often faces challenges due to varying capture angles, positional differences, and object movements, leading to misalignments and visual discrepancies. Traditional seam carving methods neglect semantic information, causing disruptions in foreground continuity. We introduce SemanticStitch, a deep learning-based framework that incorporates semantic priors of foreground objects to preserve their integrity and enhance visual coherence. Our approach includes a novel loss function that emphasizes the semantic integrity of salient objects, significantly improving stitching quality. We also present two specialized real-world datasets to evaluate our method's effectiveness. Experimental results demonstrate substantial improvements over traditional techniques, providing robust support for practical applications.

EGTM: Event-guided Efficient Turbulence Mitigation

Turbulence mitigation (TM) aims to remove the stochastic distortions and blurs introduced by atmospheric turbulence into frame cameras. Existing state-of-the-art deep-learning TM methods extract turbulence cues from multiple degraded frames to find the so-called "lucky'', not distorted patch, for "lucky fusion''. However, it requires high-capacity network to learn from coarse-grained turbulence dynamics between synchronous frames with limited frame-rate, thus fall short in computational and storage efficiency. Event cameras, with microsecond-level temporal resolution, have the potential to fundamentally address this bottleneck with efficient sparse and asynchronous imaging mechanism. In light of this, we (i) present the fundamental \textbf{``event-lucky insight''} to reveal the correlation between turbulence distortions and inverse spatiotemporal distribution of event streams. Then, build upon this insight, we (ii) propose a novel EGTM framework that extracts pixel-level reliable turbulence-free guidance from the explicit but noisy turbulent events for temporal lucky fusion. Moreover, we (iii) build the first turbulence data acquisition system to contribute the first real-world event-driven TM dataset. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly surpass the existing SOTA TM method by 710 times, 214 times and 224 times in model size, inference latency and model complexity respectively, while achieving the state-of-the-art in restoration quality (+0.94 PSNR and +0.08 SSIM) on our real-world EGTM dataset. This demonstrating the great efficiency merit of introducing event modality into TM task. Demo code and data have been uploaded in supplementary material and will be released once accepted.

A Pseudo Global Fusion Paradigm-Based Cross-View Network for LiDAR-Based Place Recognition

LiDAR-based Place Recognition (LPR) remains a critical task in Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Autonomous Driving, primarily addressing localization challenges in GPS-denied environments and supporting loop closure detection. Existing approaches reduce place recognition to a Euclidean distance-based metric learning task, neglecting the feature space's intrinsic structures and intra-class variances. Such Euclidean-centric formulation inherently limits the model's capacity to capture nonlinear data distributions, leading to suboptimal performance in complex environments and temporal-varying scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a novel cross-view network based on an innovative fusion paradigm. Our framework introduces a pseudo-global information guidance mechanism that coordinates multi-modal branches to perform feature learning within a unified semantic space. Concurrently, we propose a Manifold Adaptation and Pairwise Variance-Locality Learning Metric that constructs a Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrix to compute Mahalanobis distance, superseding traditional Euclidean distance metrics. This geometric formulation enables the model to accurately characterize intrinsic data distributions and capture complex inter-class dependencies within the feature space. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves competitive performance, particularly excelling in complex environmental conditions.

KDMOS:Knowledge Distillation for Motion Segmentation

Motion Object Segmentation (MOS) is crucial for autonomous driving, as it enhances localization, path planning, map construction, scene flow estimation, and future state prediction. While existing methods achieve strong performance, balancing accuracy and real-time inference remains a challenge. To address this, we propose a logits-based knowledge distillation framework for MOS, aiming to improve accuracy while maintaining real-time efficiency. Specifically, we adopt a Bird's Eye View (BEV) projection-based model as the student and a non-projection model as the teacher. To handle the severe imbalance between moving and non-moving classes, we decouple them and apply tailored distillation strategies, allowing the teacher model to better learn key motion-related features. This approach significantly reduces false positives and false negatives. Additionally, we introduce dynamic upsampling, optimize the network architecture, and achieve a 7.69% reduction in parameter count, mitigating overfitting. Our method achieves a notable IoU of 78.8% on the hidden test set of the SemanticKITTI-MOS dataset and delivers competitive results on the Apollo dataset. The KDMOS implementation is available at https://github.com/SCNU-RISLAB/KDMOS.