Scene-agnostic Pose Regression for Visual Localization

Absolute Pose Regression (APR) predicts 6D camera poses but lacks the adaptability to unknown environments without retraining, while Relative Pose Regression (RPR) generalizes better yet requires a large image retrieval database. Visual Odometry (VO) generalizes well in unseen environments but suffers from accumulated error in open trajectories. To address this dilemma, we introduce a new task, Scene-agnostic Pose Regression (SPR), which can achieve accurate pose regression in a flexible way while eliminating the need for retraining or databases. To benchmark SPR, we created a large-scale dataset, 360SPR, with over 200K photorealistic panoramas, 3.6M pinhole images and camera poses in 270 scenes at three different sensor heights. Furthermore, a SPR-Mamba model is initially proposed to address SPR in a dual-branch manner. Extensive experiments and studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our SPR paradigm, dataset, and model. In the unknown scenes of both 360SPR and 360Loc datasets, our method consistently outperforms APR, RPR and VO. The dataset and code are available at https://junweizheng93.github.io/publications/SPR/SPR.html.

SFDLA: Source-Free Document Layout Analysis

Document Layout Analysis (DLA) is a fundamental task in document understanding. However, existing DLA and adaptation methods often require access to large-scale source data and target labels. This requirements severely limiting their real-world applicability, particularly in privacy-sensitive and resource-constrained domains, such as financial statements, medical records, and proprietary business documents. According to our observation, directly transferring source-domain fine-tuned models on target domains often results in a significant performance drop (Avg. -32.64%). In this work, we introduce Source-Free Document Layout Analysis (SFDLA), aiming for adapting a pre-trained source DLA models to an unlabeled target domain, without access to any source data. To address this challenge, we establish the first SFDLA benchmark, covering three major DLA datasets for geometric- and content-aware adaptation. Furthermore, we propose Document Layout Analysis Adapter (DLAdapter), a novel framework that is designed to improve source-free adaptation across document domains. Our method achieves a +4.21% improvement over the source-only baseline and a +2.26% gain over existing source-free methods from PubLayNet to DocLayNet. We believe this work will inspire the DLA community to further investigate source-free document understanding. To support future research of the community, the benchmark, models, and code will be publicly available at https://github.com/s3setewe/sfdla-DLAdapter.

dARt Vinci: Egocentric Data Collection for Surgical Robot Learning at Scale

Data scarcity has long been an issue in the robot learning community. Particularly, in safety-critical domains like surgical applications, obtaining high-quality data can be especially difficult. It poses challenges to researchers seeking to exploit recent advancements in reinforcement learning and imitation learning, which have greatly improved generalizability and enabled robots to conduct tasks autonomously. We introduce dARt Vinci, a scalable data collection platform for robot learning in surgical settings. The system uses Augmented Reality (AR) hand tracking and a high-fidelity physics engine to capture subtle maneuvers in primitive surgical tasks: By eliminating the need for a physical robot setup and providing flexibility in terms of time, space, and hardware resources-such as multiview sensors and actuators-specialized simulation is a viable alternative. At the same time, AR allows the robot data collection to be more egocentric, supported by its body tracking and content overlaying capabilities. Our user study confirms the proposed system's efficiency and usability, where we use widely-used primitive tasks for training teleoperation with da Vinci surgical robots. Data throughput improves across all tasks compared to real robot settings by 41% on average. The total experiment time is reduced by an average of 10%. The temporal demand in the task load survey is improved. These gains are statistically significant. Additionally, the collected data is over 400 times smaller in size, requiring far less storage while achieving double the frequency.

Towards User-level Private Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as an influential technique, enabling the alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Despite the promising potential of RLHF, how to protect user preference privacy has become a crucial issue. Most previous work has focused on using differential privacy (DP) to protect the privacy of individual data. However, they have concentrated primarily on item-level privacy protection and have unsatisfactory performance for user-level privacy, which is more common in RLHF. This study proposes a novel framework, AUP-RLHF, which integrates user-level label DP into RLHF. We first show that the classical random response algorithm, which achieves an acceptable performance in item-level privacy, leads to suboptimal utility when in the user-level settings. We then establish a lower bound for the user-level label DP-RLHF and develop the AUP-RLHF algorithm, which guarantees $(\varepsilon, \delta)$ user-level privacy and achieves an improved estimation error. Experimental results show that AUP-RLHF outperforms existing baseline methods in sentiment generation and summarization tasks, achieving a better privacy-utility trade-off.

ChorusCVR: Chorus Supervision for Entire Space Post-Click Conversion Rate Modeling

Post-click conversion rate (CVR) estimation is a vital task in many recommender systems of revenue businesses, e.g., e-commerce and advertising. In a perspective of sample, a typical CVR positive sample usually goes through a funnel of exposure to click to conversion. For lack of post-event labels for un-clicked samples, CVR learning task commonly only utilizes clicked samples, rather than all exposed samples as for click-through rate (CTR) learning task. However, during online inference, CVR and CTR are estimated on the same assumed exposure space, which leads to a inconsistency of sample space between training and inference, i.e., sample selection bias (SSB). To alleviate SSB, previous wisdom proposes to design novel auxiliary tasks to enable the CVR learning on un-click training samples, such as CTCVR and counterfactual CVR, etc. Although alleviating SSB to some extent, none of them pay attention to the discrimination between ambiguous negative samples (un-clicked) and factual negative samples (clicked but un-converted) during modelling, which makes CVR model lacks robustness. To full this gap, we propose a novel ChorusCVR model to realize debiased CVR learning in entire-space.

LiveForesighter: Generating Future Information for Live-Streaming Recommendations at Kuaishou

Live-streaming, as a new-generation media to connect users and authors, has attracted a lot of attention and experienced rapid growth in recent years. Compared with the content-static short-video recommendation, the live-streaming recommendation faces more challenges in giving our users a satisfactory experience: (1) Live-streaming content is dynamically ever-changing along time. (2) valuable behaviors (e.g., send digital-gift, buy products) always require users to watch for a long-time (>10 min). Combining the two attributes, here raising a challenging question for live-streaming recommendation: How to discover the live-streamings that the content user is interested in at the current moment, and further a period in the future?

Graph-based Document Structure Analysis

When reading a document, glancing at the spatial layout of a document is an initial step to understand it roughly. Traditional document layout analysis (DLA) methods, however, offer only a superficial parsing of documents, focusing on basic instance detection and often failing to capture the nuanced spatial and logical relations between instances. These limitations hinder DLA-based models from achieving a gradually deeper comprehension akin to human reading. In this work, we propose a novel graph-based Document Structure Analysis (gDSA) task. This task requires that model not only detects document elements but also generates spatial and logical relations in form of a graph structure, allowing to understand documents in a holistic and intuitive manner. For this new task, we construct a relation graph-based document structure analysis dataset (GraphDoc) with 80K document images and 4.13M relation annotations, enabling training models to complete multiple tasks like reading order, hierarchical structures analysis, and complex inter-element relation inference. Furthermore, a document relation graph generator (DRGG) is proposed to address the gDSA task, which achieves performance with 57.6% at mAP$_g$@0.5 for a strong benchmark baseline on this novel task and dataset. We hope this graphical representation of document structure can mark an innovative advancement in document structure analysis and understanding. The new dataset and code will be made publicly available at https://yufanchen96.github.io/projects/GraphDoc.

ObjectFinder: Open-Vocabulary Assistive System for Interactive Object Search by Blind People

Assistive technology can be leveraged by blind people when searching for objects in their daily lives. We created ObjectFinder, an open-vocabulary interactive object-search prototype, which combines object detection with scene description and navigation. It enables blind persons to detect and navigate to objects of their choice. Our approach used co-design for the development of the prototype. We further conducted need-finding interviews to better understand challenges in object search, followed by a study with the ObjectFinder prototype in a laboratory setting simulating a living room and an office, with eight blind users. Additionally, we compared the prototype with BeMyEyes and Lookout for object search. We found that most participants felt more independent with ObjectFinder and preferred it over the baselines when deployed on more efficient hardware, as it enhances mental mapping and allows for active target definition. Moreover, we identified factors for future directions for the development of object-search systems.

Deformable Mamba for Wide Field of View Segmentation

Wide-FoV cameras, like fisheye and panoramic setups, are essential for broader perception but introduce significant distortions in 180{\deg} and 360{\deg} images, complicating dense prediction tasks. For instance, existing MAMBA models lacking distortion-aware capacity cannot perform well in panoramic semantic segmentation. To address this problem, this work presents Deformable Mamba, a unified framework specifically designed to address imaging distortions within the context of panoramic and fisheye semantic segmentation. At the core is a decoder constructed with a series of Deformable Mamba Fusion (DMF) blocks, making the whole framework more deformable, efficient, and accurate, when handling extreme distortions. Extensive evaluations across five datasets demonstrate that our method consistently improves segmentation accuracy compared to the previous state-of-the-art methods tailored for specific FoVs. Notably, Deformable Mamba achieves a +2.5% performance improvement on the 360{\deg} Stanford2D3D dataset, and shows better results across FoVs from 60{\deg} to 360{\deg}.

Solving Zero-Shot 3D Visual Grounding as Constraint Satisfaction Problems

3D visual grounding (3DVG) aims to locate objects in a 3D scene with natural language descriptions. Supervised methods have achieved decent accuracy, but have a closed vocabulary and limited language understanding ability. Zero-shot methods mostly utilize large language models (LLMs) to handle natural language descriptions, yet suffer from slow inference speed. To address these problems, in this work, we propose a zero-shot method that reformulates the 3DVG task as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP), where the variables and constraints represent objects and their spatial relations, respectively. This allows a global reasoning of all relevant objects, producing grounding results of both the target and anchor objects. Moreover, we demonstrate the flexibility of our framework by handling negation- and counting-based queries with only minor extra coding efforts. Our system, Constraint Satisfaction Visual Grounding (CSVG), has been extensively evaluated on the public datasets ScanRefer and Nr3D datasets using only open-source LLMs. Results show the effectiveness of CSVG and superior grounding accuracy over current state-of-the-art zero-shot 3DVG methods with improvements of $+7.0\%$ (Acc@0.5 score) and $+11.2\%$ on the ScanRefer and Nr3D datasets, respectively. The code of our system is publicly available at https://github.com/sunsleaf/CSVG.