TeDA: Boosting Vision-Lanuage Models for Zero-Shot 3D Object Retrieval via Testing-time Distribution Alignment

Learning discriminative 3D representations that generalize well to unknown testing categories is an emerging requirement for many real-world 3D applications. Existing well-established methods often struggle to attain this goal due to insufficient 3D training data from broader concepts. Meanwhile, pre-trained large vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) have shown remarkable zero-shot generalization capabilities. Yet, they are limited in extracting suitable 3D representations due to substantial gaps between their 2D training and 3D testing distributions. To address these challenges, we propose Testing-time Distribution Alignment (TeDA), a novel framework that adapts a pretrained 2D vision-language model CLIP for unknown 3D object retrieval at test time. To our knowledge, it is the first work that studies the test-time adaptation of a vision-language model for 3D feature learning. TeDA projects 3D objects into multi-view images, extracts features using CLIP, and refines 3D query embeddings with an iterative optimization strategy by confident query-target sample pairs in a self-boosting manner. Additionally, TeDA integrates textual descriptions generated by a multimodal language model (InternVL) to enhance 3D object understanding, leveraging CLIP's aligned feature space to fuse visual and textual cues. Extensive experiments on four open-set 3D object retrieval benchmarks demonstrate that TeDA greatly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, even those requiring extensive training. We also experimented with depth maps on Objaverse-LVIS, further validating its effectiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/wangzhichuan123/TeDA.

AI2-Active Safety: AI-enabled Interaction-aware Active Safety Analysis with Vehicle Dynamics

This paper introduces an AI-enabled, interaction-aware active safety analysis framework that accounts for groupwise vehicle interactions. Specifically, the framework employs a bicycle model-augmented with road gradient considerations-to accurately capture vehicle dynamics. In parallel, a hypergraph-based AI model is developed to predict probabilistic trajectories of ambient traffic. By integrating these two components, the framework derives vehicle intra-spacing over a 3D road surface as the solution of a stochastic ordinary differential equation, yielding high-fidelity surrogate safety measures such as time-to-collision (TTC). To demonstrate its effectiveness, the framework is analyzed using stochastic numerical methods comprising 4th-order Runge-Kutta integration and AI inference, generating probability-weighted high-fidelity TTC (HF-TTC) distributions that reflect complex multi-agent maneuvers and behavioral uncertainties. Evaluated with HF-TTC against traditional constant-velocity TTC and non-interaction-aware approaches on highway datasets, the proposed framework offers a systematic methodology for active safety analysis with enhanced potential for improving safety perception in complex traffic environments.

Learning Universal User Representations Leveraging Cross-domain User Intent at Snapchat

The development of powerful user representations is a key factor in the success of recommender systems (RecSys). Online platforms employ a range of RecSys techniques to personalize user experience across diverse in-app surfaces. User representations are often learned individually through user's historical interactions within each surface and user representations across different surfaces can be shared post-hoc as auxiliary features or additional retrieval sources. While effective, such schemes cannot directly encode collaborative filtering signals across different surfaces, hindering its capacity to discover complex relationships between user behaviors and preferences across the whole platform. To bridge this gap at Snapchat, we seek to conduct universal user modeling (UUM) across different in-app surfaces, learning general-purpose user representations which encode behaviors across surfaces. Instead of replacing domain-specific representations, UUM representations capture cross-domain trends, enriching existing representations with complementary information. This work discusses our efforts in developing initial UUM versions, practical challenges, technical choices and modeling and research directions with promising offline performance. Following successful A/B testing, UUM representations have been launched in production, powering multiple use cases and demonstrating their value. UUM embedding has been incorporated into (i) Long-form Video embedding-based retrieval, leading to 2.78% increase in Long-form Video Open Rate, (ii) Long-form Video L2 ranking, with 19.2% increase in Long-form Video View Time sum, (iii) Lens L2 ranking, leading to 1.76% increase in Lens play time, and (iv) Notification L2 ranking, with 0.87% increase in Notification Open Rate.

Virtual Roads, Smarter Safety: A Digital Twin Framework for Mixed Autonomous Traffic Safety Analysis

This paper presents a digital-twin platform for active safety analysis in mixed traffic environments. The platform is built using a multi-modal data-enabled traffic environment constructed from drone-based aerial LiDAR, OpenStreetMap, and vehicle sensor data (e.g., GPS and inclinometer readings). High-resolution 3D road geometries are generated through AI-powered semantic segmentation and georeferencing of aerial LiDAR data. To simulate real-world driving scenarios, the platform integrates the CAR Learning to Act (CARLA) simulator, Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) traffic model, and NVIDIA PhysX vehicle dynamics engine. CARLA provides detailed micro-level sensor and perception data, while SUMO manages macro-level traffic flow. NVIDIA PhysX enables accurate modeling of vehicle behaviors under diverse conditions, accounting for mass distribution, tire friction, and center of mass. This integrated system supports high-fidelity simulations that capture the complex interactions between autonomous and conventional vehicles. Experimental results demonstrate the platform's ability to reproduce realistic vehicle dynamics and traffic scenarios, enhancing the analysis of active safety measures. Overall, the proposed framework advances traffic safety research by enabling in-depth, physics-informed evaluation of vehicle behavior in dynamic and heterogeneous traffic environments.

LangCoop: Collaborative Driving with Language

Multi-agent collaboration holds great promise for enhancing the safety, reliability, and mobility of autonomous driving systems by enabling information sharing among multiple connected agents. However, existing multi-agent communication approaches are hindered by limitations of existing communication media, including high bandwidth demands, agent heterogeneity, and information loss. To address these challenges, we introduce LangCoop, a new paradigm for collaborative autonomous driving that leverages natural language as a compact yet expressive medium for inter-agent communication. LangCoop features two key innovations: Mixture Model Modular Chain-of-thought (M$^3$CoT) for structured zero-shot vision-language reasoning and Natural Language Information Packaging (LangPack) for efficiently packaging information into concise, language-based messages. Through extensive experiments conducted in the CARLA simulations, we demonstrate that LangCoop achieves a remarkable 96\% reduction in communication bandwidth (< 2KB per message) compared to image-based communication, while maintaining competitive driving performance in the closed-loop evaluation. Our project page and code are at https://xiangbogaobarry.github.io/LangCoop/.

NuScenes-SpatialQA: A Spatial Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Vision-Language Models in Autonomous Driving

Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong potential for autonomous driving tasks. However, their spatial understanding and reasoning-key capabilities for autonomous driving-still exhibit significant limitations. Notably, none of the existing benchmarks systematically evaluate VLMs' spatial reasoning capabilities in driving scenarios. To fill this gap, we propose NuScenes-SpatialQA, the first large-scale ground-truth-based Question-Answer (QA) benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the spatial understanding and reasoning capabilities of VLMs in autonomous driving. Built upon the NuScenes dataset, the benchmark is constructed through an automated 3D scene graph generation pipeline and a QA generation pipeline. The benchmark systematically evaluates VLMs' performance in both spatial understanding and reasoning across multiple dimensions. Using this benchmark, we conduct extensive experiments on diverse VLMs, including both general and spatial-enhanced models, providing the first comprehensive evaluation of their spatial capabilities in autonomous driving. Surprisingly, the experimental results show that the spatial-enhanced VLM outperforms in qualitative QA but does not demonstrate competitiveness in quantitative QA. In general, VLMs still face considerable challenges in spatial understanding and reasoning.

Dynamic Importance in Diffusion U-Net for Enhanced Image Synthesis

Traditional diffusion models typically employ a U-Net architecture. Previous studies have unveiled the roles of attention blocks in the U-Net. However, they overlook the dynamic evolution of their importance during the inference process, which hinders their further exploitation to improve image applications. In this study, we first theoretically proved that, re-weighting the outputs of the Transformer blocks within the U-Net is a "free lunch" for improving the signal-to-noise ratio during the sampling process. Next, we proposed Importance Probe to uncover and quantify the dynamic shifts in importance of the Transformer blocks throughout the denoising process. Finally, we design an adaptive importance-based re-weighting schedule tailored to specific image generation and editing tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that, our approach significantly improves the efficiency of the inference process, and enhances the aesthetic quality of the samples with identity consistency. Our method can be seamlessly integrated into any U-Net-based architecture. Code: https://github.com/Hytidel/UNetReweighting

Time-optimal Convexified Reeds-Shepp Paths on a Sphere

This article addresses time-optimal path planning for a vehicle capable of moving both forward and backward on a unit sphere with a unit maximum speed, and constrained by a maximum absolute turning rate $U_{max}$. The proposed formulation can be utilized for optimal attitude control of underactuated satellites, optimal motion planning for spherical rolling robots, and optimal path planning for mobile robots on spherical surfaces or uneven terrains. By utilizing Pontryagin's Maximum Principle and analyzing phase portraits, it is shown that for $U_{max}\geq1$, the optimal path connecting a given initial configuration to a desired terminal configuration falls within a sufficient list of 23 path types, each comprising at most 6 segments. These segments belong to the set $\{C,G,T\}$, where $C$ represents a tight turn with radius $r=\frac{1}{\sqrt{1+U_{max}^2}}$, $G$ represents a great circular arc, and $T$ represents a turn-in-place motion. Closed-form expressions for the angles of each path in the sufficient list are derived. The source code for solving the time-optimal path problem and visualization is publicly available at https://github.com/sixuli97/Optimal-Spherical-Convexified-Reeds-Shepp-Paths.

Omni-AD: Learning to Reconstruct Global and Local Features for Multi-class Anomaly Detection

In multi-class unsupervised anomaly detection(MUAD), reconstruction-based methods learn to map input images to normal patterns to identify anomalous pixels. However, this strategy easily falls into the well-known "learning shortcut" issue when decoders fail to capture normal patterns and reconstruct both normal and abnormal samples naively. To address that, we propose to learn the input features in global and local manners, forcing the network to memorize the normal patterns more comprehensively. Specifically, we design a two-branch decoder block, named Omni-block. One branch corresponds to global feature learning, where we serialize two self-attention blocks but replace the query and (key, value) with learnable tokens, respectively, thus capturing global features of normal patterns concisely and thoroughly. The local branch comprises depth-separable convolutions, whose locality enables effective and efficient learning of local features for normal patterns. By stacking Omni-blocks, we build a framework, Omni-AD, to learn normal patterns of different granularity and reconstruct them progressively. Comprehensive experiments on public anomaly detection benchmarks show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in MUAD. Code is available at https://github.com/easyoo/Omni-AD.git.

Video Motion Graphs

We present Video Motion Graphs, a system designed to generate realistic human motion videos. Using a reference video and conditional signals such as music or motion tags, the system synthesizes new videos by first retrieving video clips with gestures matching the conditions and then generating interpolation frames to seamlessly connect clip boundaries. The core of our approach is HMInterp, a robust Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) model that enables seamless interpolation of discontinuous frames, even for complex motion scenarios like dancing. HMInterp i) employs a dual-branch interpolation approach, combining a Motion Diffusion Model for human skeleton motion interpolation with a diffusion-based video frame interpolation model for final frame generation. ii) adopts condition progressive training to effectively leverage identity strong and weak conditions, such as images and pose. These designs ensure both high video texture quality and accurate motion trajectory. Results show that our Video Motion Graphs outperforms existing generative- and retrieval-based methods for multi-modal conditioned human motion video generation. Project page can be found at https://h-liu1997.github.io/Video-Motion-Graphs/