Closed-Loop Unsupervised Representation Disentanglement with $β$-VAE Distillation and Diffusion Probabilistic Feedback

Representation disentanglement may help AI fundamentally understand the real world and thus benefit both discrimination and generation tasks. It currently has at least three unresolved core issues: (i) heavy reliance on label annotation and synthetic data -- causing poor generalization on natural scenarios; (ii) heuristic/hand-craft disentangling constraints make it hard to adaptively achieve an optimal training trade-off; (iii) lacking reasonable evaluation metric, especially for the real label-free data. To address these challenges, we propose a \textbf{C}losed-\textbf{L}oop unsupervised representation \textbf{Dis}entanglement approach dubbed \textbf{CL-Dis}. Specifically, we use diffusion-based autoencoder (Diff-AE) as a backbone while resorting to $\beta$-VAE as a co-pilot to extract semantically disentangled representations. The strong generation ability of diffusion model and the good disentanglement ability of VAE model are complementary. To strengthen disentangling, VAE-latent distillation and diffusion-wise feedback are interconnected in a closed-loop system for a further mutual promotion. Then, a self-supervised \textbf{Navigation} strategy is introduced to identify interpretable semantic directions in the disentangled latent space. Finally, a new metric based on content tracking is designed to evaluate the disentanglement effect. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of CL-Dis on applications like real image manipulation and visual analysis.

[CLS] Token is All You Need for Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we propose an embarrassingly simple yet highly effective zero-shot semantic segmentation (ZS3) method, based on the pre-trained vision-language model CLIP. First, our study provides a couple of key discoveries: (i) the global tokens (a.k.a [CLS] tokens in Transformer) of the text branch in CLIP provide a powerful representation of semantic information and (ii) these text-side [CLS] tokens can be regarded as category priors to guide CLIP visual encoder pay more attention on the corresponding region of interest. Based on that, we build upon the CLIP model as a backbone which we extend with a One-Way [CLS] token navigation from text to the visual branch that enables zero-shot dense prediction, dubbed \textbf{ClsCLIP}. Specifically, we use the [CLS] token output from the text branch, as an auxiliary semantic prompt, to replace the [CLS] token in shallow layers of the ViT-based visual encoder. This one-way navigation embeds such global category prior earlier and thus promotes semantic segmentation. Furthermore, to better segment tiny objects in ZS3, we further enhance ClsCLIP with a local zoom-in strategy, which employs a region proposal pre-processing and we get ClsCLIP+. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed ZS3 method achieves a SOTA performance, and it is even comparable with those few-shot semantic segmentation methods.

Predict the Rover Mobility over Soft Terrain using Articulated Wheeled Bevameter

Robot mobility is critical for mission success, especially in soft or deformable terrains, where the complex wheel-soil interaction mechanics often leads to excessive wheel slip and sinkage, causing the eventual mission failure. To improve the success rate, online mobility prediction using vision, infrared imaging, or model-based stochastic methods have been used in the literature. This paper proposes an on-board mobility prediction approach using an articulated wheeled bevameter that consists of a force-controlled arm and an instrumented bevameter (with force and vision sensors) as its end-effector. The proposed bevameter, which emulates the traditional terramechanics tests such as pressure-sinkage and shear experiments, can measure contact parameters ahead of the rover's body in real-time, and predict the slip and sinkage of supporting wheels over the probed region. Based on the predicted mobility, the rover can select a safer path in order to avoid dangerous regions such as those covered with quicksand. Compared to the literature, our proposed method can avoid the complicated terramechanics modeling and time-consuming stochastic prediction; it can also mitigate the inaccuracy issues arising in non-contact vision-based methods. We also conduct multiple experiments to validate the proposed approach.