Application of Vision-Language Model to Pedestrians Behavior and Scene Understanding in Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving (AD) has experienced significant improvements in recent years and achieved promising 3D detection, classification, and localization results. However, many challenges remain, e.g. semantic understanding of pedestrians' behaviors, and downstream handling for pedestrian interactions. Recent studies in applications of Large Language Models (LLM) and Vision-Language Models (VLM) have achieved promising results in scene understanding and high-level maneuver planning in diverse traffic scenarios. However, deploying the billion-parameter LLMs to vehicles requires significant computation and memory resources. In this paper, we analyzed effective knowledge distillation of semantic labels to smaller Vision networks, which can be used for the semantic representation of complex scenes for downstream decision-making for planning and control.

Utilizing Large Language Models for Information Extraction from Real Estate Transactions

Real estate sales contracts contain crucial information for property transactions, but manual extraction of data can be time-consuming and error-prone. This paper explores the application of large language models, specifically transformer-based architectures, for automated information extraction from real estate contracts. We discuss challenges, techniques, and future directions in leveraging these models to improve efficiency and accuracy in real estate contract analysis.

A Survey for Foundation Models in Autonomous Driving

The advent of foundation models has revolutionized the fields of natural language processing and computer vision, paving the way for their application in autonomous driving (AD). This survey presents a comprehensive review of more than 40 research papers, demonstrating the role of foundation models in enhancing AD. Large language models contribute to planning and simulation in AD, particularly through their proficiency in reasoning, code generation and translation. In parallel, vision foundation models are increasingly adapted for critical tasks such as 3D object detection and tracking, as well as creating realistic driving scenarios for simulation and testing. Multi-modal foundation models, integrating diverse inputs, exhibit exceptional visual understanding and spatial reasoning, crucial for end-to-end AD. This survey not only provides a structured taxonomy, categorizing foundation models based on their modalities and functionalities within the AD domain but also delves into the methods employed in current research. It identifies the gaps between existing foundation models and cutting-edge AD approaches, thereby charting future research directions and proposing a roadmap for bridging these gaps.

Understanding and Improving Recurrent Networks for Human Activity Recognition by Continuous Attention

Deep neural networks, including recurrent networks, have been successfully applied to human activity recognition. Unfortunately, the final representation learned by recurrent networks might encode some noise (irrelevant signal components, unimportant sensor modalities, etc.). Besides, it is difficult to interpret the recurrent networks to gain insight into the models' behavior. To address these issues, we propose two attention models for human activity recognition: temporal attention and sensor attention. These two mechanisms adaptively focus on important signals and sensor modalities. To further improve the understandability and mean F1 score, we add continuity constraints, considering that continuous sensor signals are more robust than discrete ones. We evaluate the approaches on three datasets and obtain state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, qualitative analysis shows that the attention learned by the models agree well with human intuition.