Reducing the Gap Between Pretrained Speech Enhancement and Recognition Models Using a Real Speech-Trained Bridging Module

The information loss or distortion caused by single-channel speech enhancement (SE) harms the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR). Observation addition (OA) is an effective post-processing method to improve ASR performance by balancing noisy and enhanced speech. Determining the OA coefficient is crucial. However, the currently supervised OA coefficient module, called the bridging module, only utilizes simulated noisy speech for training, which has a severe mismatch with real noisy speech. In this paper, we propose training strategies to train the bridging module with real noisy speech. First, DNSMOS is selected to evaluate the perceptual quality of real noisy speech with no need for the corresponding clean label to train the bridging module. Additional constraints during training are introduced to enhance the robustness of the bridging module further. Each utterance is evaluated by the ASR back-end using various OA coefficients to obtain the word error rates (WERs). The WERs are used to construct a multidimensional vector. This vector is introduced into the bridging module with multi-task learning and is used to determine the optimal OA coefficients. The experimental results on the CHiME-4 dataset show that the proposed methods all had significant improvement compared with the simulated data trained bridging module, especially under real evaluation sets.

Adapting Whisper for Code-Switching through Encoding Refining and Language-Aware Decoding

Code-switching (CS) automatic speech recognition (ASR) faces challenges due to the language confusion resulting from accents, auditory similarity, and seamless language switches. Adaptation on the pre-trained multi-lingual model has shown promising performance for CS-ASR. In this paper, we adapt Whisper, which is a large-scale multilingual pre-trained speech recognition model, to CS from both encoder and decoder parts. First, we propose an encoder refiner to enhance the encoder's capacity of intra-sentence swithching. Second, we propose using two sets of language-aware adapters with different language prompt embeddings to achieve language-specific decoding information in each decoder layer. Then, a fusion module is added to fuse the language-aware decoding. The experimental results using the SEAME dataset show that, compared with the baseline model, the proposed approach achieves a relative MER reduction of 4.1% and 7.2% on the dev_man and dev_sge test sets, respectively, surpassing state-of-the-art methods. Through experiments, we found that the proposed method significantly improves the performance on non-native language in CS speech, indicating that our approach enables Whisper to better distinguish between the two languages.

Benchmarking the Robustness of Optical Flow Estimation to Corruptions

Optical flow estimation is extensively used in autonomous driving and video editing. While existing models demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across various benchmarks, the robustness of these methods has been infrequently investigated. Despite some research focusing on the robustness of optical flow models against adversarial attacks, there has been a lack of studies investigating their robustness to common corruptions. Taking into account the unique temporal characteristics of optical flow, we introduce 7 temporal corruptions specifically designed for benchmarking the robustness of optical flow models, in addition to 17 classical single-image corruptions, in which advanced PSF Blur simulation method is performed. Two robustness benchmarks, KITTI-FC and GoPro-FC, are subsequently established as the first corruption robustness benchmark for optical flow estimation, with Out-Of-Domain (OOD) and In-Domain (ID) settings to facilitate comprehensive studies. Robustness metrics, Corruption Robustness Error (CRE), Corruption Robustness Error ratio (CREr), and Relative Corruption Robustness Error (RCRE) are further introduced to quantify the optical flow estimation robustness. 29 model variants from 15 optical flow methods are evaluated, yielding 10 intriguing observations, such as 1) the absolute robustness of the model is heavily dependent on the estimation performance; 2) the corruptions that diminish local information are more serious than that reduce visual effects. We also give suggestions for the design and application of optical flow models. We anticipate that our benchmark will serve as a foundational resource for advancing research in robust optical flow estimation. The benchmarks and source code will be released at https://github.com/ZhonghuaYi/optical_flow_robustness_benchmark.

EI-Nexus: Towards Unmediated and Flexible Inter-Modality Local Feature Extraction and Matching for Event-Image Data

Event cameras, with high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, have limited research on the inter-modality local feature extraction and matching of event-image data. We propose EI-Nexus, an unmediated and flexible framework that integrates two modality-specific keypoint extractors and a feature matcher. To achieve keypoint extraction across viewpoint and modality changes, we bring Local Feature Distillation (LFD), which transfers the viewpoint consistency from a well-learned image extractor to the event extractor, ensuring robust feature correspondence. Furthermore, with the help of Context Aggregation (CA), a remarkable enhancement is observed in feature matching. We further establish the first two inter-modality feature matching benchmarks, MVSEC-RPE and EC-RPE, to assess relative pose estimation on event-image data. Our approach outperforms traditional methods that rely on explicit modal transformation, offering more unmediated and adaptable feature extraction and matching, achieving better keypoint similarity and state-of-the-art results on the MVSEC-RPE and EC-RPE benchmarks. The source code and benchmarks will be made publicly available at https://github.com/ZhonghuaYi/EI-Nexus_official.

E-3DGS: Gaussian Splatting with Exposure and Motion Events

Estimating Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) from images captured under optimal conditions has been extensively explored in the vision community. However, robotic applications often face challenges such as motion blur, insufficient illumination, and high computational overhead, which adversely affect downstream tasks like navigation, inspection, and scene visualization. To address these challenges, we propose E-3DGS, a novel event-based approach that partitions events into motion (from camera or object movement) and exposure (from camera exposure), using the former to handle fast-motion scenes and using the latter to reconstruct grayscale images for high-quality training and optimization of event-based 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). We introduce a novel integration of 3DGS with exposure events for high-quality reconstruction of explicit scene representations. Our versatile framework can operate on motion events alone for 3D reconstruction, enhance quality using exposure events, or adopt a hybrid mode that balances quality and effectiveness by optimizing with initial exposure events followed by high-speed motion events. We also introduce EME-3D, a real-world 3D dataset with exposure events, motion events, camera calibration parameters, and sparse point clouds. Our method is faster and delivers better reconstruction quality than event-based NeRF while being more cost-effective than NeRF methods that combine event and RGB data by using a single event sensor. By combining motion and exposure events, E-3DGS sets a new benchmark for event-based 3D reconstruction with robust performance in challenging conditions and lower hardware demands. The source code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/MasterHow/E-3DGS.

GenMapping: Unleashing the Potential of Inverse Perspective Mapping for Robust Online HD Map Construction

Online High-Definition (HD) maps have emerged as the preferred option for autonomous driving, overshadowing the counterpart offline HD maps due to flexible update capability and lower maintenance costs. However, contemporary online HD map models embed parameters of visual sensors into training, resulting in a significant decrease in generalization performance when applied to visual sensors with different parameters. Inspired by the inherent potential of Inverse Perspective Mapping (IPM), where camera parameters are decoupled from the training process, we have designed a universal map generation framework, GenMapping. The framework is established with a triadic synergy architecture, including principal and dual auxiliary branches. When faced with a coarse road image with local distortion translated via IPM, the principal branch learns robust global features under the state space models. The two auxiliary branches are a dense perspective branch and a sparse prior branch. The former exploits the correlation information between static and moving objects, whereas the latter introduces the prior knowledge of OpenStreetMap (OSM). The triple-enhanced merging module is crafted to synergistically integrate the unique spatial features from all three branches. To further improve generalization capabilities, a Cross-View Map Learning (CVML) scheme is leveraged to realize joint learning within the common space. Additionally, a Bidirectional Data Augmentation (BiDA) module is introduced to mitigate reliance on datasets concurrently. A thorough array of experimental results shows that the proposed model surpasses current state-of-the-art methods in both semantic mapping and vectorized mapping, while also maintaining a rapid inference speed. The source code will be publicly available at https://github.com/lynn-yu/GenMapping.

A Flexible Framework for Universal Computational Aberration Correction via Automatic Lens Library Generation and Domain Adaptation

Emerging universal Computational Aberration Correction (CAC) paradigms provide an inspiring solution to light-weight and high-quality imaging without repeated data preparation and model training to accommodate new lens designs. However, the training databases in these approaches, i.e., the lens libraries (LensLibs), suffer from their limited coverage of real-world aberration behaviors. In this work, we set up an OmniLens framework for universal CAC, considering both the generalization ability and flexibility. OmniLens extends the idea of universal CAC to a broader concept, where a base model is trained for three cases, including zero-shot CAC with the pre-trained model, few-shot CAC with a little lens-specific data for fine-tuning, and domain adaptive CAC using domain adaptation for lens-descriptions-unknown lens. In terms of OmniLens's data foundation, we first propose an Evolution-based Automatic Optical Design (EAOD) pipeline to construct LensLib automatically, coined AODLib, whose diversity is enriched by an evolution framework, with comprehensive constraints and a hybrid optimization strategy for achieving realistic aberration behaviors. For network design, we introduce the guidance of high-quality codebook priors to facilitate zero-shot CAC and few-shot CAC, which enhances the model's generalization ability, while also boosting its convergence in a few-shot case. Furthermore, based on the statistical observation of dark channel priors in optical degradation, we design an unsupervised regularization term to adapt the base model to the target descriptions-unknown lens using its aberration images without ground truth. We validate OmniLens on 4 manually designed low-end lenses with various structures and aberration behaviors. Remarkably, the base model trained on AODLib exhibits strong generalization capabilities, achieving 97% of the lens-specific performance in a zero-shot setting.

Serialized Speech Information Guidance with Overlapped Encoding Separation for Multi-Speaker Automatic Speech Recognition

Serialized output training (SOT) attracts increasing attention due to its convenience and flexibility for multi-speaker automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, it is not easy to train with attention loss only. In this paper, we propose the overlapped encoding separation (EncSep) to fully utilize the benefits of the connectionist temporal classification (CTC) and attention hybrid loss. This additional separator is inserted after the encoder to extract the multi-speaker information with CTC losses. Furthermore, we propose the serialized speech information guidance SOT (GEncSep) to further utilize the separated encodings. The separated streams are concatenated to provide single-speaker information to guide attention during decoding. The experimental results on LibriMix show that the single-speaker encoding can be separated from the overlapped encoding. The CTC loss helps to improve the encoder representation under complex scenarios. GEncSep further improved performance.

SF-TIM: A Simple Framework for Enhancing Quadrupedal Robot Jumping Agility by Combining Terrain Imagination and Measurement

Dynamic jumping on high platforms and over gaps differentiates legged robots from wheeled counterparts. Compared to walking on rough terrains, dynamic locomotion on abrupt surfaces requires fusing proprioceptive and exteroceptive perception for explosive movements. In this paper, we propose SF-TIM (Simple Framework combining Terrain Imagination and Measurement), a single-policy method that enhances quadrupedal robot jumping agility, while preserving their fundamental blind walking capabilities. In addition, we introduce a terrain-guided reward design specifically to assist quadrupedal robots in high jumping, improving their performance in this task. To narrow the simulation-to-reality gap in quadrupedal robot learning, we introduce a stable and high-speed elevation map generation framework, enabling zero-shot simulation-to-reality transfer of locomotion ability. Our algorithm has been deployed and validated on both the small-/large-size quadrupedal robots, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world applications: the robot has successfully traversed various high platforms and gaps, showing the robustness of our proposed approach. A demo video has been made available at https://flysoaryun.github.io/SF-TIM.

Occlusion-Aware Seamless Segmentation

Panoramic images can broaden the Field of View (FoV), occlusion-aware prediction can deepen the understanding of the scene, and domain adaptation can transfer across viewing domains. In this work, we introduce a novel task, Occlusion-Aware Seamless Segmentation (OASS), which simultaneously tackles all these three challenges. For benchmarking OASS, we establish a new human-annotated dataset for Blending Panoramic Amodal Seamless Segmentation, i.e., BlendPASS. Besides, we propose the first solution UnmaskFormer, aiming at unmasking the narrow FoV, occlusions, and domain gaps all at once. Specifically, UnmaskFormer includes the crucial designs of Unmasking Attention (UA) and Amodal-oriented Mix (AoMix). Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the BlendPASS dataset, reaching a remarkable mAPQ of 26.58% and mIoU of 43.66%. On public panoramic semantic segmentation datasets, i.e., SynPASS and DensePASS, our method outperforms previous methods and obtains 45.34% and 48.08% in mIoU, respectively. The fresh BlendPASS dataset and our source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/yihong-97/OASS.