LoRA3D: Low-Rank Self-Calibration of 3D Geometric Foundation Models

Emerging 3D geometric foundation models, such as DUSt3R, offer a promising approach for in-the-wild 3D vision tasks. However, due to the high-dimensional nature of the problem space and scarcity of high-quality 3D data, these pre-trained models still struggle to generalize to many challenging circumstances, such as limited view overlap or low lighting. To address this, we propose LoRA3D, an efficient self-calibration pipeline to $\textit{specialize}$ the pre-trained models to target scenes using their own multi-view predictions. Taking sparse RGB images as input, we leverage robust optimization techniques to refine multi-view predictions and align them into a global coordinate frame. In particular, we incorporate prediction confidence into the geometric optimization process, automatically re-weighting the confidence to better reflect point estimation accuracy. We use the calibrated confidence to generate high-quality pseudo labels for the calibrating views and use low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the models on the pseudo-labeled data. Our method does not require any external priors or manual labels. It completes the self-calibration process on a $\textbf{single standard GPU within just 5 minutes}$. Each low-rank adapter requires only $\textbf{18MB}$ of storage. We evaluated our method on $\textbf{more than 160 scenes}$ from the Replica, TUM and Waymo Open datasets, achieving up to $\textbf{88% performance improvement}$ on 3D reconstruction, multi-view pose estimation and novel-view rendering.

PreF3R: Pose-Free Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting from Variable-length Image Sequence

We present PreF3R, Pose-Free Feed-forward 3D Reconstruction from an image sequence of variable length. Unlike previous approaches, PreF3R removes the need for camera calibration and reconstructs the 3D Gaussian field within a canonical coordinate frame directly from a sequence of unposed images, enabling efficient novel-view rendering. We leverage DUSt3R's ability for pair-wise 3D structure reconstruction, and extend it to sequential multi-view input via a spatial memory network, eliminating the need for optimization-based global alignment. Additionally, PreF3R incorporates a dense Gaussian parameter prediction head, which enables subsequent novel-view synthesis with differentiable rasterization. This allows supervising our model with the combination of photometric loss and pointmap regression loss, enhancing both photorealism and structural accuracy. Given a sequence of ordered images, PreF3R incrementally reconstructs the 3D Gaussian field at 20 FPS, therefore enabling real-time novel-view rendering. Empirical experiments demonstrate that PreF3R is an effective solution for the challenging task of pose-free feed-forward novel-view synthesis, while also exhibiting robust generalization to unseen scenes.

Learning Multiple Initial Solutions to Optimization Problems

Sequentially solving similar optimization problems under strict runtime constraints is essential for many applications, such as robot control, autonomous driving, and portfolio management. The performance of local optimization methods in these settings is sensitive to the initial solution: poor initialization can lead to slow convergence or suboptimal solutions. To address this challenge, we propose learning to predict \emph{multiple} diverse initial solutions given parameters that define the problem instance. We introduce two strategies for utilizing multiple initial solutions: (i) a single-optimizer approach, where the most promising initial solution is chosen using a selection function, and (ii) a multiple-optimizers approach, where several optimizers, potentially run in parallel, are each initialized with a different solution, with the best solution chosen afterward. We validate our method on three optimal control benchmark tasks: cart-pole, reacher, and autonomous driving, using different optimizers: DDP, MPPI, and iLQR. We find significant and consistent improvement with our method across all evaluation settings and demonstrate that it efficiently scales with the number of initial solutions required. The code is available at $\href{https://github.com/EladSharony/miso}{\tt{https://github.com/EladSharony/miso}}$.

Cocoon: Robust Multi-Modal Perception with Uncertainty-Aware Sensor Fusion

An important paradigm in 3D object detection is the use of multiple modalities to enhance accuracy in both normal and challenging conditions, particularly for long-tail scenarios. To address this, recent studies have explored two directions of adaptive approaches: MoE-based adaptive fusion, which struggles with uncertainties arising from distinct object configurations, and late fusion for output-level adaptive fusion, which relies on separate detection pipelines and limits comprehensive understanding. In this work, we introduce Cocoon, an object- and feature-level uncertainty-aware fusion framework. The key innovation lies in uncertainty quantification for heterogeneous representations, enabling fair comparison across modalities through the introduction of a feature aligner and a learnable surrogate ground truth, termed feature impression. We also define a training objective to ensure that their relationship provides a valid metric for uncertainty quantification. Cocoon consistently outperforms existing static and adaptive methods in both normal and challenging conditions, including those with natural and artificial corruptions. Furthermore, we show the validity and efficacy of our uncertainty metric across diverse datasets.

Control-oriented Clustering of Visual Latent Representation

We initiate a study of the geometry of the visual representation space -- the information channel from the vision encoder to the action decoder -- in an image-based control pipeline learned from behavior cloning. Inspired by the phenomenon of neural collapse (NC) in image classification, we investigate whether a similar law of clustering emerges in the visual representation space. Since image-based control is a regression task without explicitly defined classes, the central piece of the puzzle lies in determining according to what implicit classes the visual features cluster, if such a law exists. Focusing on image-based planar pushing, we posit the most important role of the visual representation in a control task is to convey a goal to the action decoder. We then classify training samples of expert demonstrations into eight "control-oriented" classes based on (a) the relative pose between the object and the target in the input or (b) the relative pose of the object induced by expert actions in the output, where one class corresponds to one relative pose orthant (REPO). Across four different instantiations of architecture, we report the prevalent emergence of control-oriented clustering in the visual representation space according to the eight REPOs. Beyond empirical observation, we show such a law of clustering can be leveraged as an algorithmic tool to improve test-time performance when training a policy with limited expert demonstrations. Particularly, we pretrain the vision encoder using NC as a regularization to encourage control-oriented clustering of the visual features. Surprisingly, such an NC-pretrained vision encoder, when finetuned end-to-end with the action decoder, boosts the test-time performance by 10% to 35% in the low-data regime. Real-world vision-based planar pushing experiments confirmed the surprising advantage of control-oriented visual representation pretraining.

The Benefit of Being Bayesian in Online Conformal Prediction

Based on the framework of Conformal Prediction (CP), we study the online construction of valid confidence sets given a black-box machine learning model. By converting the target confidence levels into quantile levels, the problem can be reduced to predicting the quantiles (in hindsight) of a sequentially revealed data sequence. Two very different approaches have been studied previously. (i) Direct approach: Assuming the data sequence is iid or exchangeable, one could maintain the empirical distribution of the observed data as an algorithmic belief, and directly predict its quantiles. (ii) Indirect approach: As statistical assumptions often do not hold in practice, a recent trend is to consider the adversarial setting and apply first-order online optimization to moving quantile losses (Gibbs & Cand\`es, 2021). It requires knowing the target quantile level beforehand, and suffers from certain validity issues on the obtained confidence sets, due to the associated loss linearization. This paper presents a novel Bayesian CP framework that combines their strengths. Without any statistical assumption, it is able to both: (i) answer multiple arbitrary confidence level queries online, with provably low regret; and (ii) overcome the validity issues suffered by first-order optimization baselines, due to being "data-centric" rather than "iterate-centric". From a technical perspective, our key idea is to regularize the algorithmic belief of the above direct approach by a Bayesian prior, which "robustifies" it by simulating a non-linearized Follow the Regularized Leader (FTRL) algorithm on the output. For statisticians, this can be regarded as an online adversarial view of Bayesian inference. Importantly, the proposed belief update backbone is shared by prediction heads targeting different confidence levels, bringing practical benefits analogous to U-calibration (Kleinberg et al., 2023).

OmniGenBench: Automating Large-scale in-silico Benchmarking for Genomic Foundation Models

The advancements in artificial intelligence in recent years, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), have fueled expectations for breakthroughs in genomic foundation models (GFMs). The code of nature, hidden in diverse genomes since the very beginning of life's evolution, holds immense potential for impacting humans and ecosystems through genome modeling. Recent breakthroughs in GFMs, such as Evo, have attracted significant investment and attention to genomic modeling, as they address long-standing challenges and transform in-silico genomic studies into automated, reliable, and efficient paradigms. In the context of this flourishing era of consecutive technological revolutions in genomics, GFM studies face two major challenges: the lack of GFM benchmarking tools and the absence of open-source software for diverse genomics. These challenges hinder the rapid evolution of GFMs and their wide application in tasks such as understanding and synthesizing genomes, problems that have persisted for decades. To address these challenges, we introduce GFMBench, a framework dedicated to GFM-oriented benchmarking. GFMBench standardizes benchmark suites and automates benchmarking for a wide range of open-source GFMs. It integrates millions of genomic sequences across hundreds of genomic tasks from four large-scale benchmarks, democratizing GFMs for a wide range of in-silico genomic applications. Additionally, GFMBench is released as open-source software, offering user-friendly interfaces and diverse tutorials, applicable for AutoBench and complex tasks like RNA design and structure prediction. To facilitate further advancements in genome modeling, we have launched a public leaderboard showcasing the benchmark performance derived from AutoBench. GFMBench represents a step toward standardizing GFM benchmarking and democratizing GFM applications.

OmniGenome: Aligning RNA Sequences with Secondary Structures in Genomic Foundation Models

The structures of RNA sequences play a vital role in various cellular processes, while existing genomic foundation models (FMs) have struggled with precise sequence-structure alignment, due to the complexity of exponential combinations of nucleotide bases. In this study, we introduce OmniGenome, a foundation model that addresses this critical challenge of sequence-structure alignment in RNA FMs. OmniGenome bridges the sequences with secondary structures using structure-contextualized modeling, enabling hard in-silico genomic tasks that existing FMs cannot handle, e.g., RNA design tasks. The results on two comprehensive genomic benchmarks show that OmniGenome achieves state-of-the-art performance on complex RNA subtasks. For example, OmniGenome solved 74% of complex puzzles, compared to SpliceBERT which solved only 3% of the puzzles. Besides, OmniGenome solves most of the puzzles within $1$ hour, while the existing methods usually allocate $24$ hours for each puzzle. Overall, OmniGenome establishes wide genomic application cases and offers profound insights into biological mechanisms from the perspective of sequence-structure alignment.

Fast and Certifiable Trajectory Optimization

We propose semidefinite trajectory optimization (STROM), a framework that computes fast and certifiably optimal solutions for nonconvex trajectory optimization problems defined by polynomial objectives and constraints. STROM employs sparse second-order Lasserre's hierarchy to generate semidefinite program (SDP) relaxations of trajectory optimization. Different from existing tools (e.g., YALMIP and SOSTOOLS in Matlab), STROM generates chain-like multiple-block SDPs with only positive semidefinite (PSD) variables. Moreover, STROM does so two orders of magnitude faster. Underpinning STROM is cuADMM, the first ADMM-based SDP solver implemented in CUDA and runs in GPUs. cuADMM builds upon the symmetric Gauss-Seidel ADMM algorithm and leverages GPU parallelization to speedup solving sparse linear systems and projecting onto PSD cones. In five trajectory optimization problems (inverted pendulum, cart-pole, vehicle landing, flying robot, and car back-in), cuADMM computes optimal trajectories (with certified suboptimality below 1%) in minutes (when other solvers take hours or run out of memory) and seconds (when others take minutes). Further, when warmstarted by data-driven initialization in the inverted pendulum problem, cuADMM delivers real-time performance: providing certifiably optimal trajectories in 0.66 seconds despite the SDP has 49,500 variables and 47,351 constraints.

Adapting Conformal Prediction to Distribution Shifts Without Labels

Conformal prediction (CP) enables machine learning models to output prediction sets with guaranteed coverage rate, assuming exchangeable data. Unfortunately, the exchangeability assumption is frequently violated due to distribution shifts in practice, and the challenge is often compounded by the lack of ground truth labels at test time. Focusing on classification in this paper, our goal is to improve the quality of CP-generated prediction sets using only unlabeled data from the test domain. This is achieved by two new methods called ECP and EACP, that adjust the score function in CP according to the base model's uncertainty on the unlabeled test data. Through extensive experiments on a number of large-scale datasets and neural network architectures, we show that our methods provide consistent improvement over existing baselines and nearly match the performance of supervised algorithms.