From Visuals to Vocabulary: Establishing Equivalence Between Image and Text Token Through Autoregressive Pre-training in MLLMs

While MLLMs perform well on perceptual tasks, they lack precise multimodal alignment, limiting performance. To address this challenge, we propose Vision Dynamic Embedding-Guided Pretraining (VDEP), a hybrid autoregressive training paradigm for MLLMs. Utilizing dynamic embeddings from the MLP following the visual encoder, this approach supervises image hidden states and integrates image tokens into autoregressive training. Existing MLLMs primarily focused on recovering information from textual inputs, often neglecting the effective processing of image data. In contrast, the key improvement of this work is the reinterpretation of multimodal alignment as a process of recovering information from input data, with particular emphasis on reconstructing detailed visual features.The proposed method seamlessly integrates into standard models without architectural changes. Experiments on 13 benchmarks show VDEP outperforms baselines, surpassing existing methods.

FedPAW: Federated Learning with Personalized Aggregation Weights for Urban Vehicle Speed Prediction

Vehicle speed prediction is crucial for intelligent transportation systems, promoting more reliable autonomous driving by accurately predicting future vehicle conditions. Due to variations in drivers' driving styles and vehicle types, speed predictions for different target vehicles may significantly differ. Existing methods may not realize personalized vehicle speed prediction while protecting drivers' data privacy. We propose a Federated learning framework with Personalized Aggregation Weights (FedPAW) to overcome these challenges. This method captures client-specific information by measuring the weighted mean squared error between the parameters of local models and global models. The server sends tailored aggregated models to clients instead of a single global model, without incurring additional computational and communication overhead for clients. To evaluate the effectiveness of FedPAW, we collected driving data in urban scenarios using the autonomous driving simulator CARLA, employing an LSTM-based Seq2Seq model with a multi-head attention mechanism to predict the future speed of target vehicles. The results demonstrate that our proposed FedPAW ranks lowest in prediction error within the time horizon of 10 seconds, with a 0.8% reduction in test MAE, compared to eleven representative benchmark baselines. The source code of FedPAW and dataset CarlaVSP are open-accessed at: https://github.com/heyuepeng/PFLlibVSP and https://pan.baidu.com/s/1qs8fxUvSPERV3C9i6pfUIw?pwd=tl3e.

FedRAV: Hierarchically Federated Region-Learning for Traffic Object Classification of Autonomous Vehicles

The emerging federated learning enables distributed autonomous vehicles to train equipped deep learning models collaboratively without exposing their raw data, providing great potential for utilizing explosively growing autonomous driving data. However, considering the complicated traffic environments and driving scenarios, deploying federated learning for autonomous vehicles is inevitably challenged by non-independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) data of vehicles, which may lead to failed convergence and low training accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchically Federated Region-learning framework of Autonomous Vehicles (FedRAV), a two-stage framework, which adaptively divides a large area containing vehicles into sub-regions based on the defined region-wise distance, and achieves personalized vehicular models and regional models. This approach ensures that the personalized vehicular model adopts the beneficial models while discarding the unprofitable ones. We validate our FedRAV framework against existing federated learning algorithms on three real-world autonomous driving datasets in various heterogeneous settings. The experiment results demonstrate that our framework outperforms those known algorithms, and improves the accuracy by at least 3.69%. The source code of FedRAV is available at: https://github.com/yjzhai-cs/FedRAV.