Towards Flexible 3D Perception: Object-Centric Occupancy Completion Augments 3D Object Detection

While 3D object bounding box (bbox) representation has been widely used in autonomous driving perception, it lacks the ability to capture the precise details of an object's intrinsic geometry. Recently, occupancy has emerged as a promising alternative for 3D scene perception. However, constructing a high-resolution occupancy map remains infeasible for large scenes due to computational constraints. Recognizing that foreground objects only occupy a small portion of the scene, we introduce object-centric occupancy as a supplement to object bboxes. This representation not only provides intricate details for detected objects but also enables higher voxel resolution in practical applications. We advance the development of object-centric occupancy perception from both data and algorithm perspectives. On the data side, we construct the first object-centric occupancy dataset from scratch using an automated pipeline. From the algorithmic standpoint, we introduce a novel object-centric occupancy completion network equipped with an implicit shape decoder that manages dynamic-size occupancy generation. This network accurately predicts the complete object-centric occupancy volume for inaccurate object proposals by leveraging temporal information from long sequences. Our method demonstrates robust performance in completing object shapes under noisy detection and tracking conditions. Additionally, we show that our occupancy features significantly enhance the detection results of state-of-the-art 3D object detectors, especially for incomplete or distant objects in the Waymo Open Dataset.

ETSM: Automating Dissection Trajectory Suggestion and Confidence Map-Based Safety Margin Prediction for Robot-assisted Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection

Robot-assisted Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection (ESD) improves the surgical procedure by providing a more comprehensive view through advanced robotic instruments and bimanual operation, thereby enhancing dissection efficiency and accuracy. Accurate prediction of dissection trajectories is crucial for better decision-making, reducing intraoperative errors, and improving surgical training. Nevertheless, predicting these trajectories is challenging due to variable tumor margins and dynamic visual conditions. To address this issue, we create the ESD Trajectory and Confidence Map-based Safety Margin (ETSM) dataset with $1849$ short clips, focusing on submucosal dissection with a dual-arm robotic system. We also introduce a framework that combines optimal dissection trajectory prediction with a confidence map-based safety margin, providing a more secure and intelligent decision-making tool to minimize surgical risks for ESD procedures. Additionally, we propose the Regression-based Confidence Map Prediction Network (RCMNet), which utilizes a regression approach to predict confidence maps for dissection areas, thereby delineating various levels of safety margins. We evaluate our RCMNet using three distinct experimental setups: in-domain evaluation, robustness assessment, and out-of-domain evaluation. Experimental results show that our approach excels in the confidence map-based safety margin prediction task, achieving a mean absolute error (MAE) of only $3.18$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to apply a regression approach for visual guidance concerning delineating varying safety levels of dissection areas. Our approach bridges gaps in current research by improving prediction accuracy and enhancing the safety of the dissection process, showing great clinical significance in practice.

PDZSeg: Adapting the Foundation Model for Dissection Zone Segmentation with Visual Prompts in Robot-assisted Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection

Purpose: Endoscopic surgical environments present challenges for dissection zone segmentation due to unclear boundaries between tissue types, leading to segmentation errors where models misidentify or overlook edges. This study aims to provide precise dissection zone suggestions during endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) procedures, enhancing ESD safety. Methods: We propose the Prompted-based Dissection Zone Segmentation (PDZSeg) model, designed to leverage diverse visual prompts such as scribbles and bounding boxes. By overlaying these prompts onto images and fine-tuning a foundational model on a specialized dataset, our approach improves segmentation performance and user experience through flexible input methods. Results: The PDZSeg model was validated using three experimental setups: in-domain evaluation, variability in visual prompt availability, and robustness assessment. Using the ESD-DZSeg dataset, results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation approaches. This is the first study to integrate visual prompt design into dissection zone segmentation. Conclusion: The PDZSeg model effectively utilizes visual prompts to enhance segmentation performance and user experience, supported by the novel ESD-DZSeg dataset as a benchmark for dissection zone segmentation in ESD. Our work establishes a foundation for future research.

D$^2$-World: An Efficient World Model through Decoupled Dynamic Flow

This technical report summarizes the second-place solution for the Predictive World Model Challenge held at the CVPR-2024 Workshop on Foundation Models for Autonomous Systems. We introduce D$^2$-World, a novel World model that effectively forecasts future point clouds through Decoupled Dynamic flow. Specifically, the past semantic occupancies are obtained via existing occupancy networks (e.g., BEVDet). Following this, the occupancy results serve as the input for a single-stage world model, generating future occupancy in a non-autoregressive manner. To further simplify the task, dynamic voxel decoupling is performed in the world model. The model generates future dynamic voxels by warping the existing observations through voxel flow, while remaining static voxels can be easily obtained through pose transformation. As a result, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the OpenScene Predictive World Model benchmark, securing second place, and trains more than 300% faster than the baseline model. Code is available at https://github.com/zhanghm1995/D2-World.

Privacy-Preserving Federated Foundation Model for Generalist Ultrasound Artificial Intelligence

Ultrasound imaging is widely used in clinical diagnosis due to its non-invasive nature and real-time capabilities. However, conventional ultrasound diagnostics face several limitations, including high dependence on physician expertise and suboptimal image quality, which complicates interpretation and increases the likelihood of diagnostic errors. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a promising solution to enhance clinical diagnosis, particularly in detecting abnormalities across various biomedical imaging modalities. Nonetheless, current AI models for ultrasound imaging face critical challenges. First, these models often require large volumes of labeled medical data, raising concerns over patient privacy breaches. Second, most existing models are task-specific, which restricts their broader clinical utility. To overcome these challenges, we present UltraFedFM, an innovative privacy-preserving ultrasound foundation model. UltraFedFM is collaboratively pre-trained using federated learning across 16 distributed medical institutions in 9 countries, leveraging a dataset of over 1 million ultrasound images covering 19 organs and 10 ultrasound modalities. This extensive and diverse data, combined with a secure training framework, enables UltraFedFM to exhibit strong generalization and diagnostic capabilities. It achieves an average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.927 for disease diagnosis and a dice similarity coefficient of 0.878 for lesion segmentation. Notably, UltraFedFM surpasses the diagnostic accuracy of mid-level ultrasonographers and matches the performance of expert-level sonographers in the joint diagnosis of 8 common systemic diseases. These findings indicate that UltraFedFM can significantly enhance clinical diagnostics while safeguarding patient privacy, marking an advancement in AI-driven ultrasound imaging for future clinical applications.

VisionPAD: A Vision-Centric Pre-training Paradigm for Autonomous Driving

This paper introduces VisionPAD, a novel self-supervised pre-training paradigm designed for vision-centric algorithms in autonomous driving. In contrast to previous approaches that employ neural rendering with explicit depth supervision, VisionPAD utilizes more efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct multi-view representations using only images as supervision. Specifically, we introduce a self-supervised method for voxel velocity estimation. By warping voxels to adjacent frames and supervising the rendered outputs, the model effectively learns motion cues in the sequential data. Furthermore, we adopt a multi-frame photometric consistency approach to enhance geometric perception. It projects adjacent frames to the current frame based on rendered depths and relative poses, boosting the 3D geometric representation through pure image supervision. Extensive experiments on autonomous driving datasets demonstrate that VisionPAD significantly improves performance in 3D object detection, occupancy prediction and map segmentation, surpassing state-of-the-art pre-training strategies by a considerable margin.

CoPESD: A Multi-Level Surgical Motion Dataset for Training Large Vision-Language Models to Co-Pilot Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection

submucosal dissection (ESD) enables rapid resection of large lesions, minimizing recurrence rates and improving long-term overall survival. Despite these advantages, ESD is technically challenging and carries high risks of complications, necessitating skilled surgeons and precise instruments. Recent advancements in Large Visual-Language Models (LVLMs) offer promising decision support and predictive planning capabilities for robotic systems, which can augment the accuracy of ESD and reduce procedural risks. However, existing datasets for multi-level fine-grained ESD surgical motion understanding are scarce and lack detailed annotations. In this paper, we design a hierarchical decomposition of ESD motion granularity and introduce a multi-level surgical motion dataset (CoPESD) for training LVLMs as the robotic \textbf{Co}-\textbf{P}ilot of \textbf{E}ndoscopic \textbf{S}ubmucosal \textbf{D}issection. CoPESD includes 17,679 images with 32,699 bounding boxes and 88,395 multi-level motions, from over 35 hours of ESD videos for both robot-assisted and conventional surgeries. CoPESD enables granular analysis of ESD motions, focusing on the complex task of submucosal dissection. Extensive experiments on the LVLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of CoPESD in training LVLMs to predict following surgical robotic motions. As the first multimodal ESD motion dataset, CoPESD supports advanced research in ESD instruction-following and surgical automation. The dataset is available at \href{https://github.com/gkw0010/CoPESD}{https://github.com/gkw0010/CoPESD.}}

Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Need

While next-token prediction is considered a promising path towards artificial general intelligence, it has struggled to excel in multimodal tasks, which are still dominated by diffusion models (e.g., Stable Diffusion) and compositional approaches (e.g., CLIP combined with LLMs). In this paper, we introduce Emu3, a new suite of state-of-the-art multimodal models trained solely with next-token prediction. By tokenizing images, text, and videos into a discrete space, we train a single transformer from scratch on a mixture of multimodal sequences. Emu3 outperforms several well-established task-specific models in both generation and perception tasks, surpassing flagship models such as SDXL and LLaVA-1.6, while eliminating the need for diffusion or compositional architectures. Emu3 is also capable of generating high-fidelity video via predicting the next token in a video sequence. We simplify complex multimodal model designs by converging on a singular focus: tokens, unlocking great potential for scaling both during training and inference. Our results demonstrate that next-token prediction is a promising path towards building general multimodal intelligence beyond language. We open-source key techniques and models to support further research in this direction.

MixPolyp: Integrating Mask, Box and Scribble Supervision for Enhanced Polyp Segmentation

Limited by the expensive labeling, polyp segmentation models are plagued by data shortages. To tackle this, we propose the mixed supervised polyp segmentation paradigm (MixPolyp). Unlike traditional models relying on a single type of annotation, MixPolyp combines diverse annotation types (mask, box, and scribble) within a single model, thereby expanding the range of available data and reducing labeling costs. To achieve this, MixPolyp introduces three novel supervision losses to handle various annotations: Subspace Projection loss (L_SP), Binary Minimum Entropy loss (L_BME), and Linear Regularization loss (L_LR). For box annotations, L_SP eliminates shape inconsistencies between the prediction and the supervision. For scribble annotations, L_BME provides supervision for unlabeled pixels through minimum entropy constraint, thereby alleviating supervision sparsity. Furthermore, L_LR provides dense supervision by enforcing consistency among the predictions, thus reducing the non-uniqueness. These losses are independent of the model structure, making them generally applicable. They are used only during training, adding no computational cost during inference. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate MixPolyp's effectiveness.

A three-dimensional force estimation method for the cable-driven soft robot based on monocular images

Soft manipulators are known for their superiority in coping with high-safety-demanding interaction tasks, e.g., robot-assisted surgeries, elderly caring, etc. Yet the challenges residing in real-time contact feedback have hindered further applications in precise manipulation. This paper proposes an end-to-end network to estimate the 3D contact force of the soft robot, with the aim of enhancing its capabilities in interactive tasks. The presented method features directly utilizing monocular images fused with multidimensional actuation information as the network inputs. This approach simplifies the preprocessing of raw data compared to related studies that utilize 3D shape information for network inputs, consequently reducing configuration reconstruction errors. The unified feature representation module is devised to elevate low-dimensional features from the system's actuation signals to the same level as image features, facilitating smoother integration of multimodal information. The proposed method has been experimentally validated in the soft robot testbed, achieving satisfying accuracy in 3D force estimation (with a mean relative error of 0.84% compared to the best-reported result of 2.2% in the related works).