CM2-Net: Continual Cross-Modal Mapping Network for Driver Action Recognition

Driver action recognition has significantly advanced in enhancing driver-vehicle interactions and ensuring driving safety by integrating multiple modalities, such as infrared and depth. Nevertheless, compared to RGB modality only, it is always laborious and costly to collect extensive data for all types of non-RGB modalities in car cabin environments. Therefore, previous works have suggested independently learning each non-RGB modality by fine-tuning a model pre-trained on RGB videos, but these methods are less effective in extracting informative features when faced with newly-incoming modalities due to large domain gaps. In contrast, we propose a Continual Cross-Modal Mapping Network (CM2-Net) to continually learn each newly-incoming modality with instructive prompts from the previously-learned modalities. Specifically, we have developed Accumulative Cross-modal Mapping Prompting (ACMP), to map the discriminative and informative features learned from previous modalities into the feature space of newly-incoming modalities. Then, when faced with newly-incoming modalities, these mapped features are able to provide effective prompts for which features should be extracted and prioritized. These prompts are accumulating throughout the continual learning process, thereby boosting further recognition performances. Extensive experiments conducted on the Drive&Act dataset demonstrate the performance superiority of CM2-Net on both uni- and multi-modal driver action recognition.

MALT: Multi-scale Action Learning Transformer for Online Action Detection

Online action detection (OAD) aims to identify ongoing actions from streaming video in real-time, without access to future frames. Since these actions manifest at varying scales of granularity, ranging from coarse to fine, projecting an entire set of action frames to a single latent encoding may result in a lack of local information, necessitating the acquisition of action features across multiple scales. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale action learning transformer (MALT), which includes a novel recurrent decoder (used for feature fusion) that includes fewer parameters and can be trained more efficiently. A hierarchical encoder with multiple encoding branches is further proposed to capture multi-scale action features. The output from the preceding branch is then incrementally input to the subsequent branch as part of a cross-attention calculation. In this way, output features transition from coarse to fine as the branches deepen. We also introduce an explicit frame scoring mechanism employing sparse attention, which filters irrelevant frames more efficiently, without requiring an additional network. The proposed method achieved state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets (THUMOS'14 and TVSeries), outperforming all existing models used for comparison, with an mAP of 0.2% for THUMOS'14 and an mcAP of 0.1% for TVseries.

Quality-aware Masked Diffusion Transformer for Enhanced Music Generation

In recent years, diffusion-based text-to-music (TTM) generation has gained prominence, offering a novel approach to synthesizing musical content from textual descriptions. Achieving high accuracy and diversity in this generation process requires extensive, high-quality data, which often constitutes only a fraction of available datasets. Within open-source datasets, the prevalence of issues like mislabeling, weak labeling, unlabeled data, and low-quality music waveform significantly hampers the development of music generation models. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel quality-aware masked diffusion transformer (QA-MDT) approach that enables generative models to discern the quality of input music waveform during training. Building on the unique properties of musical signals, we have adapted and implemented a MDT model for TTM task, while further unveiling its distinct capacity for quality control. Moreover, we address the issue of low-quality captions with a caption refinement data processing approach. Our demo page is shown in https://qa-mdt.github.io/. Code on https://github.com/ivcylc/qa-mdt

LLM-based Robot Task Planning with Exceptional Handling for General Purpose Service Robots

The development of a general purpose service robot for daily life necessitates the robot's ability to deploy a myriad of fundamental behaviors judiciously. Recent advancements in training Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to generate action sequences directly, given an instruction in natural language with no additional domain information. However, while the outputs of LLMs are semantically correct, the generated task plans may not accurately map to acceptable actions and might encompass various linguistic ambiguities. LLM hallucinations pose another challenge for robot task planning, which results in content that is inconsistent with real-world facts or user inputs. In this paper, we propose a task planning method based on a constrained LLM prompt scheme, which can generate an executable action sequence from a command. An exceptional handling module is further proposed to deal with LLM hallucinations problem. This module can ensure the LLM-generated results are admissible in the current environment. We evaluate our method on the commands generated by the RoboCup@Home Command Generator, observing that the robot demonstrates exceptional performance in both comprehending instructions and executing tasks.

Multi-agent Traffic Prediction via Denoised Endpoint Distribution

The exploration of high-speed movement by robots or road traffic agents is crucial for autonomous driving and navigation. Trajectory prediction at high speeds requires considering historical features and interactions with surrounding entities, a complexity not as pronounced in lower-speed environments. Prior methods have assessed the spatio-temporal dynamics of agents but often neglected intrinsic intent and uncertainty, thereby limiting their effectiveness. We present the Denoised Endpoint Distribution model for trajectory prediction, which distinctively models agents' spatio-temporal features alongside their intrinsic intentions and uncertainties. By employing Diffusion and Transformer models to focus on agent endpoints rather than entire trajectories, our approach significantly reduces model complexity and enhances performance through endpoint information. Our experiments on open datasets, coupled with comparison and ablation studies, demonstrate our model's efficacy and the importance of its components. This approach advances trajectory prediction in high-speed scenarios and lays groundwork for future developments.

Behind the Veil: Enhanced Indoor 3D Scene Reconstruction with Occluded Surfaces Completion

In this paper, we present a novel indoor 3D reconstruction method with occluded surface completion, given a sequence of depth readings. Prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods only focus on the reconstruction of the visible areas in a scene, neglecting the invisible areas due to the occlusions, e.g., the contact surface between furniture, occluded wall and floor. Our method tackles the task of completing the occluded scene surfaces, resulting in a complete 3D scene mesh. The core idea of our method is learning 3D geometry prior from various complete scenes to infer the occluded geometry of an unseen scene from solely depth measurements. We design a coarse-fine hierarchical octree representation coupled with a dual-decoder architecture, i.e., Geo-decoder and 3D Inpainter, which jointly reconstructs the complete 3D scene geometry. The Geo-decoder with detailed representation at fine levels is optimized online for each scene to reconstruct visible surfaces. The 3D Inpainter with abstract representation at coarse levels is trained offline using various scenes to complete occluded surfaces. As a result, while the Geo-decoder is specialized for an individual scene, the 3D Inpainter can be generally applied across different scenes. We evaluate the proposed method on the 3D Completed Room Scene (3D-CRS) and iTHOR datasets, significantly outperforming the SOTA methods by a gain of 16.8% and 24.2% in terms of the completeness of 3D reconstruction. 3D-CRS dataset including a complete 3D mesh of each scene is provided at project webpage.

TCLC-GS: Tightly Coupled LiDAR-Camera Gaussian Splatting for Surrounding Autonomous Driving Scenes

Most 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) based methods for urban scenes initialize 3D Gaussians directly with 3D LiDAR points, which not only underutilizes LiDAR data capabilities but also overlooks the potential advantages of fusing LiDAR with camera data. In this paper, we design a novel tightly coupled LiDAR-Camera Gaussian Splatting (TCLC-GS) to fully leverage the combined strengths of both LiDAR and camera sensors, enabling rapid, high-quality 3D reconstruction and novel view RGB/depth synthesis. TCLC-GS designs a hybrid explicit (colorized 3D mesh) and implicit (hierarchical octree feature) 3D representation derived from LiDAR-camera data, to enrich the properties of 3D Gaussians for splatting. 3D Gaussian's properties are not only initialized in alignment with the 3D mesh which provides more completed 3D shape and color information, but are also endowed with broader contextual information through retrieved octree implicit features. During the Gaussian Splatting optimization process, the 3D mesh offers dense depth information as supervision, which enhances the training process by learning of a robust geometry. Comprehensive evaluations conducted on the Waymo Open Dataset and nuScenes Dataset validate our method's state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Utilizing a single NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti, our method demonstrates fast training and achieves real-time RGB and depth rendering at 90 FPS in resolution of 1920x1280 (Waymo), and 120 FPS in resolution of 1600x900 (nuScenes) in urban scenarios.

UPNeRF: A Unified Framework for Monocular 3D Object Reconstruction and Pose Estimation

Monocular 3D reconstruction for categorical objects heavily relies on accurately perceiving each object's pose. While gradient-based optimization within a NeRF framework updates initially given poses, this paper highlights that such a scheme fails when the initial pose even moderately deviates from the true pose. Consequently, existing methods often depend on a third-party 3D object to provide an initial object pose, leading to increased complexity and generalization issues. To address these challenges, we present UPNeRF, a Unified framework integrating Pose estimation and NeRF-based reconstruction, bringing us closer to real-time monocular 3D object reconstruction. UPNeRF decouples the object's dimension estimation and pose refinement to resolve the scale-depth ambiguity, and introduces an effective projected-box representation that generalizes well cross different domains. While using a dedicated pose estimator that smoothly integrates into an object-centric NeRF, UPNeRF is free from external 3D detectors. UPNeRF achieves state-of-the-art results in both reconstruction and pose estimation tasks on the nuScenes dataset. Furthermore, UPNeRF exhibits exceptional Cross-dataset generalization on the KITTI and Waymo datasets, surpassing prior methods with up to 50% reduction in rotation and translation error.

Multitask frame-level learning for few-shot sound event detection

This paper focuses on few-shot Sound Event Detection (SED), which aims to automatically recognize and classify sound events with limited samples. However, prevailing methods methods in few-shot SED predominantly rely on segment-level predictions, which often providing detailed, fine-grained predictions, particularly for events of brief duration. Although frame-level prediction strategies have been proposed to overcome these limitations, these strategies commonly face difficulties with prediction truncation caused by background noise. To alleviate this issue, we introduces an innovative multitask frame-level SED framework. In addition, we introduce TimeFilterAug, a linear timing mask for data augmentation, to increase the model's robustness and adaptability to diverse acoustic environments. The proposed method achieves a F-score of 63.8%, securing the 1st rank in the few-shot bioacoustic event detection category of the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events Challenge 2023.

StainFuser: Controlling Diffusion for Faster Neural Style Transfer in Multi-Gigapixel Histology Images

Stain normalization algorithms aim to transform the color and intensity characteristics of a source multi-gigapixel histology image to match those of a target image, mitigating inconsistencies in the appearance of stains used to highlight cellular components in the images. We propose a new approach, StainFuser, which treats this problem as a style transfer task using a novel Conditional Latent Diffusion architecture, eliminating the need for handcrafted color components. With this method, we curate SPI-2M the largest stain normalization dataset to date of over 2 million histology images with neural style transfer for high-quality transformations. Trained on this data, StainFuser outperforms current state-of-the-art GAN and handcrafted methods in terms of the quality of normalized images. Additionally, compared to existing approaches, it improves the performance of nuclei instance segmentation and classification models when used as a test time augmentation method on the challenging CoNIC dataset. Finally, we apply StainFuser on multi-gigapixel Whole Slide Images (WSIs) and demonstrate improved performance in terms of computational efficiency, image quality and consistency across tiles over current methods.