Department of Computing, Imperial College London, London UK, SW7 2AZ
Abstract:Civil aviation is a cornerstone of global transportation and commerce, and ensuring its safety, efficiency and customer satisfaction is paramount. Yet conventional Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions in aviation remain siloed and narrow, focusing on isolated tasks or single modalities. They struggle to integrate heterogeneous data such as voice communications, radar tracks, sensor streams and textual reports, which limits situational awareness, adaptability, and real-time decision support. This paper introduces the vision of AviationLMM, a Large Multimodal foundation Model for civil aviation, designed to unify the heterogeneous data streams of civil aviation and enable understanding, reasoning, generation and agentic applications. We firstly identify the gaps between existing AI solutions and requirements. Secondly, we describe the model architecture that ingests multimodal inputs such as air-ground voice, surveillance, on-board telemetry, video and structured texts, and performs cross-modal alignment and fusion, and produces flexible outputs ranging from situation summaries and risk alerts to predictive diagnostics and multimodal incident reconstructions. In order to fully realize this vision, we identify key research opportunities to address, including data acquisition, alignment and fusion, pretraining, reasoning, trustworthiness, privacy, robustness to missing modalities, and synthetic scenario generation. By articulating the design and challenges of AviationLMM, we aim to boost the civil aviation foundation model progress and catalyze coordinated research efforts toward an integrated, trustworthy and privacy-preserving aviation AI ecosystem.
Abstract:Large vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit strong performance across various tasks. However, these VLMs encounter significant challenges when applied to the remote sensing domain due to the inherent differences between remote sensing images and natural images. Existing remote sensing VLMs often fail to extract fine-grained visual features and suffer from visual forgetting during deep language processing. To address this, we introduce MF-RSVLM, a Multi-Feature Fusion Remote Sensing Vision--Language Model that effectively extracts and fuses visual features for RS understanding. MF-RSVLM learns multi-scale visual representations and combines global context with local details, improving the capture of small and complex structures in RS scenes. A recurrent visual feature injection scheme ensures the language model remains grounded in visual evidence and reduces visual forgetting during generation. Extensive experiments on diverse RS benchmarks show that MF-RSVLM achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance across remote sensing classification, image captioning, and VQA tasks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Yunkaidang/RSVLM.
Abstract:A fundamental challenge in Continual Learning (CL) is catastrophic forgetting, where adapting to new tasks degrades the performance on previous ones. While the field has evolved with diverse methods, this rapid surge in diverse methodologies has culminated in a fragmented research landscape. The lack of a unified framework, including inconsistent implementations, conflicting dependencies, and varying evaluation protocols, makes fair comparison and reproducible research increasingly difficult. To address this challenge, we propose LibContinual, a comprehensive and reproducible library designed to serve as a foundational platform for realistic CL. Built upon a high-cohesion, low-coupling modular architecture, LibContinual integrates 19 representative algorithms across five major methodological categories, providing a standardized execution environment. Meanwhile, leveraging this unified framework, we systematically identify and investigate three implicit assumptions prevalent in mainstream evaluation: (1) offline data accessibility, (2) unregulated memory resources, and (3) intra-task semantic homogeneity. We argue that these assumptions often overestimate the real-world applicability of CL methods. Through our comprehensive analysis using strict online CL settings, a novel unified memory budget protocol, and a proposed category-randomized setting, we reveal significant performance drops in many representative CL methods when subjected to these real-world constraints. Our study underscores the necessity of resource-aware and semantically robust CL strategies, and offers LibContinual as a foundational toolkit for future research in realistic continual learning. The source code is available from \href{https://github.com/RL-VIG/LibContinual}{https://github.com/RL-VIG/LibContinual}.
Abstract:Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong perception and reasoning performance on existing remote sensing (RS) benchmarks. However, most prior benchmarks rely on low-resolution imagery, and some high-resolution benchmarks suffer from flawed reasoning-task designs. We show that text-only LLMs can perform competitively with multimodal vision-language models on RS reasoning tasks without access to images, revealing a critical mismatch between current benchmarks and the intended evaluation of visual understanding. To enable faithful assessment, we introduce RSHR-Bench, a super-high-resolution benchmark for RS visual understanding and reasoning. RSHR-Bench contains 5,329 full-scene images with a long side of at least 4,000 pixels, with up to about 3 x 10^8 pixels per image, sourced from widely used RS corpora and UAV collections. We design four task families: multiple-choice VQA, open-ended VQA, image captioning, and single-image evaluation. These tasks cover nine perception categories and four reasoning types, supporting multi-turn and multi-image dialog. To reduce reliance on language priors, we apply adversarial filtering with strong LLMs followed by rigorous human verification. Overall, we construct 3,864 VQA tasks, 3,913 image captioning tasks, and 500 fully human-written or verified single-image evaluation VQA pairs. Evaluations across open-source, closed-source, and RS-specific VLMs reveal persistent performance gaps in super-high-resolution scenarios. Code: https://github.com/Yunkaidang/RSHR
Abstract:We propose a hybrid reconstruction framework for dual-spectral CT (DSCT) that integrates iterative methods with deep learning models. The reconstruction process consists of two complementary components: a knowledge-driven module and a data-driven module. In the knowledge-driven phase, we employ the oblique projection modification technique (OPMT) to reconstruct an intermediate solution of the basis material images from the projection data. We select OPMT for this role because of its fast convergence, which allows it to rapidly generate an intermediate solution that successfully achieves basis material decomposition. Subsequently, in the data-driven phase, we introduce a novel neural network, ResDynUNet++, to refine this intermediate solution. The ResDynUNet++ is built upon a UNet++ backbone by replacing standard convolutions with residual dynamic convolution blocks, which combine the adaptive, input-specific feature extraction of dynamic convolution with the stable training of residual connections. This architecture is designed to address challenges like channel imbalance and near-interface large artifacts in DSCT, producing clean and accurate final solutions. Extensive experiments on both synthetic phantoms and real clinical datasets validate the efficacy and superior performance of the proposed method.
Abstract:In modern Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), cameras are a key component due to their ability to provide valuable information for multiple stakeholders. A central task is Multi-Camera Vehicle Tracking (MCVT), which generates vehicle trajectories and enables applications such as anomaly detection, traffic density estimation, and suspect vehicle tracking. However, most existing studies on MCVT emphasize accuracy while overlooking real-time performance and scalability. These two aspects are essential for real-world deployment and become increasingly challenging in city-scale applications as the number of cameras grows. To address this issue, we propose SAE-MCVT, the first scalable real-time MCVT framework. The system includes several edge devices that interact with one central workstation separately. On the edge side, live RTSP video streams are serialized and processed through modules including object detection, object tracking, geo-mapping, and feature extraction. Only lightweight metadata -- vehicle locations and deep appearance features -- are transmitted to the central workstation. On the central side, cross-camera association is calculated under the constraint of spatial-temporal relations between adjacent cameras, which are learned through a self-supervised camera link model. Experiments on the RoundaboutHD dataset show that SAE-MCVT maintains real-time operation on 2K 15 FPS video streams and achieves an IDF1 score of 61.2. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first scalable real-time MCVT framework suitable for city-scale deployment.
Abstract:Continual learning in vision-language models (VLMs) faces critical challenges in balancing parameter efficiency, memory consumption, and optimization stability. While First-Order (FO) optimization (e.g., SGD) dominate current approaches, their deterministic gradients often trap models in suboptimal local minima and incur substantial memory overhead. This paper pioneers a systematic exploration of Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization for vision-language continual learning (VLCL). We first identify the incompatibility of naive full-ZO adoption in VLCL due to modality-specific instability. To resolve this, we selectively applying ZO to either vision or language modalities while retaining FO in the complementary branch. Furthermore, we develop a layer-wise optimization paradigm that interleaves ZO and FO across network layers, capitalizing on the heterogeneous learning dynamics of shallow versus deep representations. A key theoretical insight reveals that ZO perturbations in vision branches exhibit higher variance than language counterparts, prompting a gradient sign normalization mechanism with modality-specific perturbation constraints. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, reducing memory consumption by 89.1% compared to baselines. Code will be available upon publication.




Abstract:Cross-domain few-shot segmentation (CD-FSS) aims to segment objects of novel classes in new domains, which is often challenging due to the diverse characteristics of target domains and the limited availability of support data. Most CD-FSS methods redesign and retrain in-domain FSS models using various domain-generalization techniques, which are effective but costly to train. To address these issues, we propose adapting informative model structures of the well-trained FSS model for target domains by learning domain characteristics from few-shot labeled support samples during inference, thereby eliminating the need for retraining. Specifically, we first adaptively identify domain-specific model structures by measuring parameter importance using a novel structure Fisher score in a data-dependent manner. Then, we progressively train the selected informative model structures with hierarchically constructed training samples, progressing from fewer to more support shots. The resulting Informative Structure Adaptation (ISA) method effectively addresses domain shifts and equips existing well-trained in-domain FSS models with flexible adaptation capabilities for new domains, eliminating the need to redesign or retrain CD-FSS models on base data. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating superior performance across multiple CD-FSS benchmarks.
Abstract:Dataset distillation synthesizes compact datasets that enable models to achieve performance comparable to training on the original large-scale datasets. However, existing distillation methods overlook the robustness of the model, resulting in models that are vulnerable to adversarial attacks when trained on distilled data. To address this limitation, we introduce the task of ``robust dataset distillation", a novel paradigm that embeds adversarial robustness into the synthetic datasets during the distillation process. We propose Matching Adversarial Trajectories (MAT), a method that integrates adversarial training into trajectory-based dataset distillation. MAT incorporates adversarial samples during trajectory generation to obtain robust training trajectories, which are then used to guide the distillation process. As experimentally demonstrated, even through natural training on our distilled dataset, models can achieve enhanced adversarial robustness while maintaining competitive accuracy compared to existing distillation methods. Our work highlights robust dataset distillation as a new and important research direction and provides a strong baseline for future research to bridge the gap between efficient training and adversarial robustness.




Abstract:We have witnessed remarkable progress in foundation models in vision tasks. Currently, several recent works have utilized the segmenting anything model (SAM) to boost the segmentation performance in medical images, where most of them focus on training an adaptor for fine-tuning a large amount of pixel-wise annotated medical images following a fully supervised manner. In this paper, to reduce the labeling cost, we investigate a novel weakly-supervised SAM-based segmentation model, namely WeakMedSAM. Specifically, our proposed WeakMedSAM contains two modules: 1) to mitigate severe co-occurrence in medical images, a sub-class exploration module is introduced to learn accurate feature representations. 2) to improve the quality of the class activation maps, our prompt affinity mining module utilizes the prompt capability of SAM to obtain an affinity map for random-walk refinement. Our method can be applied to any SAM-like backbone, and we conduct experiments with SAMUS and EfficientSAM. The experimental results on three popularly-used benchmark datasets, i.e., BraTS 2019, AbdomenCT-1K, and MSD Cardiac dataset, show the promising results of our proposed WeakMedSAM. Our code is available at https://github.com/wanghr64/WeakMedSAM.