MathFlow: Enhancing the Perceptual Flow of MLLMs for Visual Mathematical Problems

Despite impressive performance across diverse tasks, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have yet to fully demonstrate their potential in visual mathematical problem-solving, particularly in accurately perceiving and interpreting diagrams. Inspired by typical processes of humans, we hypothesize that the perception capabilities to extract meaningful information from diagrams is crucial, as it directly impacts subsequent inference processes. To validate this hypothesis, we developed FlowVerse, a comprehensive benchmark that categorizes all information used during problem-solving into four components, which are then combined into six problem versions for evaluation. Our preliminary results on FlowVerse reveal that existing MLLMs exhibit substantial limitations when extracting essential information and reasoned property from diagrams and performing complex reasoning based on these visual inputs. In response, we introduce MathFlow, a modular problem-solving pipeline that decouples perception and inference into distinct stages, thereby optimizing each independently. Given the perceptual limitations observed in current MLLMs, we trained MathFlow-P-7B as a dedicated perception model. Experimental results indicate that MathFlow-P-7B yields substantial performance gains when integrated with various closed-source and open-source inference models. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the MathFlow pipeline and its compatibility to diverse inference frameworks. The FlowVerse benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/MathFlow-zju/MathFlow.

Generative Artificial Intelligence in Robotic Manipulation: A Survey

This survey provides a comprehensive review on recent advancements of generative learning models in robotic manipulation, addressing key challenges in the field. Robotic manipulation faces critical bottlenecks, including significant challenges in insufficient data and inefficient data acquisition, long-horizon and complex task planning, and the multi-modality reasoning ability for robust policy learning performance across diverse environments. To tackle these challenges, this survey introduces several generative model paradigms, including Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), diffusion models, probabilistic flow models, and autoregressive models, highlighting their strengths and limitations. The applications of these models are categorized into three hierarchical layers: the Foundation Layer, focusing on data generation and reward generation; the Intermediate Layer, covering language, code, visual, and state generation; and the Policy Layer, emphasizing grasp generation and trajectory generation. Each layer is explored in detail, along with notable works that have advanced the state of the art. Finally, the survey outlines future research directions and challenges, emphasizing the need for improved efficiency in data utilization, better handling of long-horizon tasks, and enhanced generalization across diverse robotic scenarios. All the related resources, including research papers, open-source data, and projects, are collected for the community in https://github.com/GAI4Manipulation/AwesomeGAIManipulation

LargeAD: Large-Scale Cross-Sensor Data Pretraining for Autonomous Driving

Recent advancements in vision foundation models (VFMs) have revolutionized visual perception in 2D, yet their potential for 3D scene understanding, particularly in autonomous driving applications, remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce LargeAD, a versatile and scalable framework designed for large-scale 3D pretraining across diverse real-world driving datasets. Our framework leverages VFMs to extract semantically rich superpixels from 2D images, which are aligned with LiDAR point clouds to generate high-quality contrastive samples. This alignment facilitates cross-modal representation learning, enhancing the semantic consistency between 2D and 3D data. We introduce several key innovations: i) VFM-driven superpixel generation for detailed semantic representation, ii) a VFM-assisted contrastive learning strategy to align multimodal features, iii) superpoint temporal consistency to maintain stable representations across time, and iv) multi-source data pretraining to generalize across various LiDAR configurations. Our approach delivers significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods in both linear probing and fine-tuning tasks for both LiDAR-based segmentation and object detection. Extensive experiments on eleven large-scale multi-modal datasets highlight our superior performance, demonstrating the adaptability, efficiency, and robustness in real-world autonomous driving scenarios.

Continual Learning for Segment Anything Model Adaptation

Although the current different types of SAM adaptation methods have achieved promising performance for various downstream tasks, such as prompt-based ones and adapter-based ones, most of them belong to the one-step adaptation paradigm. In real-world scenarios, we are generally confronted with the dynamic scenario where the data comes in a streaming manner. Driven by the practical need, in this paper, we first propose a novel Continual SAM adaptation (CoSAM) benchmark with 8 different task domains and carefully analyze the limitations of the existing SAM one-step adaptation methods in the continual segmentation scenario. Then we propose a novel simple-yet-effective Mixture of Domain Adapters (MoDA) algorithm which utilizes the Global Feature Tokens (GFT) and Global Assistant Tokens (GAT) modules to help the SAM encoder extract well-separated features for different task domains, and then provide the accurate task-specific information for continual learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed MoDA obviously surpasses the existing classic continual learning methods, as well as prompt-based and adapter-based approaches for continual segmentation. Moreover, after sequential learning on the CoSAM benchmark with diverse data distributions, our MoDA maintains highly competitive results in the natural image domain, approaching the zero-shot performance of the original SAM, demonstrating its superior capability in knowledge preservation. Notably, the proposed MoDA can be seamlessly integrated into various one-step adaptation methods of SAM, which can consistently bring obvious performance gains. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/yangjl1215/CoSAM}

SimCMF: A Simple Cross-modal Fine-tuning Strategy from Vision Foundation Models to Any Imaging Modality

Foundation models like ChatGPT and Sora that are trained on a huge scale of data have made a revolutionary social impact. However, it is extremely challenging for sensors in many different fields to collect similar scales of natural images to train strong foundation models. To this end, this work presents a simple and effective framework, SimCMF, to study an important problem: cross-modal fine-tuning from vision foundation models trained on natural RGB images to other imaging modalities of different physical properties (e.g., polarization). In SimCMF, we conduct a thorough analysis of different basic components from the most naive design and ultimately propose a novel cross-modal alignment module to address the modality misalignment problem. We apply SimCMF to a representative vision foundation model Segment Anything Model (SAM) to support any evaluated new imaging modality. Given the absence of relevant benchmarks, we construct a benchmark for performance evaluation. Our experiments confirm the intriguing potential of transferring vision foundation models in enhancing other sensors' performance. SimCMF can improve the segmentation performance (mIoU) from 22.15% to 53.88% on average for evaluated modalities and consistently outperforms other baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/mt-cly/SimCMF

SimMAT: Exploring Transferability from Vision Foundation Models to Any Image Modality

Foundation models like ChatGPT and Sora that are trained on a huge scale of data have made a revolutionary social impact. However, it is extremely challenging for sensors in many different fields to collect similar scales of natural images to train strong foundation models. To this end, this work presents a simple and effective framework SimMAT to study an open problem: the transferability from vision foundation models trained on natural RGB images to other image modalities of different physical properties (e.g., polarization). SimMAT consists of a modality-agnostic transfer layer (MAT) and a pretrained foundation model. We apply SimMAT to a representative vision foundation model Segment Anything Model (SAM) to support any evaluated new image modality. Given the absence of relevant benchmarks, we construct a new benchmark to evaluate the transfer learning performance. Our experiments confirm the intriguing potential of transferring vision foundation models in enhancing other sensors' performance. Specifically, SimMAT can improve the segmentation performance (mIoU) from 22.15% to 53.88% on average for evaluated modalities and consistently outperforms other baselines. We hope that SimMAT can raise awareness of cross-modal transfer learning and benefit various fields for better results with vision foundation models.

iControl3D: An Interactive System for Controllable 3D Scene Generation

3D content creation has long been a complex and time-consuming process, often requiring specialized skills and resources. While recent advancements have allowed for text-guided 3D object and scene generation, they still fall short of providing sufficient control over the generation process, leading to a gap between the user's creative vision and the generated results. In this paper, we present iControl3D, a novel interactive system that empowers users to generate and render customizable 3D scenes with precise control. To this end, a 3D creator interface has been developed to provide users with fine-grained control over the creation process. Technically, we leverage 3D meshes as an intermediary proxy to iteratively merge individual 2D diffusion-generated images into a cohesive and unified 3D scene representation. To ensure seamless integration of 3D meshes, we propose to perform boundary-aware depth alignment before fusing the newly generated mesh with the existing one in 3D space. Additionally, to effectively manage depth discrepancies between remote content and foreground, we propose to model remote content separately with an environment map instead of 3D meshes. Finally, our neural rendering interface enables users to build a radiance field of their scene online and navigate the entire scene. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our system. The code will be made available at https://github.com/xingyi-li/iControl3D.

4D Panoptic Scene Graph Generation

We are living in a three-dimensional space while moving forward through a fourth dimension: time. To allow artificial intelligence to develop a comprehensive understanding of such a 4D environment, we introduce 4D Panoptic Scene Graph (PSG-4D), a new representation that bridges the raw visual data perceived in a dynamic 4D world and high-level visual understanding. Specifically, PSG-4D abstracts rich 4D sensory data into nodes, which represent entities with precise location and status information, and edges, which capture the temporal relations. To facilitate research in this new area, we build a richly annotated PSG-4D dataset consisting of 3K RGB-D videos with a total of 1M frames, each of which is labeled with 4D panoptic segmentation masks as well as fine-grained, dynamic scene graphs. To solve PSG-4D, we propose PSG4DFormer, a Transformer-based model that can predict panoptic segmentation masks, track masks along the time axis, and generate the corresponding scene graphs via a relation component. Extensive experiments on the new dataset show that our method can serve as a strong baseline for future research on PSG-4D. In the end, we provide a real-world application example to demonstrate how we can achieve dynamic scene understanding by integrating a large language model into our PSG-4D system.

Calib3D: Calibrating Model Preferences for Reliable 3D Scene Understanding

Safety-critical 3D scene understanding tasks necessitate not only accurate but also confident predictions from 3D perception models. This study introduces Calib3D, a pioneering effort to benchmark and scrutinize the reliability of 3D scene understanding models from an uncertainty estimation viewpoint. We comprehensively evaluate 28 state-of-the-art models across 10 diverse 3D datasets, uncovering insightful phenomena that cope with both the aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties in 3D scene understanding. We discover that despite achieving impressive levels of accuracy, existing models frequently fail to provide reliable uncertainty estimates -- a pitfall that critically undermines their applicability in safety-sensitive contexts. Through extensive analysis of key factors such as network capacity, LiDAR representations, rasterization resolutions, and 3D data augmentation techniques, we correlate these aspects directly with the model calibration efficacy. Furthermore, we introduce DeptS, a novel depth-aware scaling approach aimed at enhancing 3D model calibration. Extensive experiments across a wide range of configurations validate the superiority of our method. We hope this work could serve as a cornerstone for fostering reliable 3D scene understanding. Code and benchmark toolkits are publicly available.

Self-Supervised Class-Agnostic Motion Prediction with Spatial and Temporal Consistency Regularizations

The perception of motion behavior in a dynamic environment holds significant importance for autonomous driving systems, wherein class-agnostic motion prediction methods directly predict the motion of the entire point cloud. While most existing methods rely on fully-supervised learning, the manual labeling of point cloud data is laborious and time-consuming. Therefore, several annotation-efficient methods have been proposed to address this challenge. Although effective, these methods rely on weak annotations or additional multi-modal data like images, and the potential benefits inherent in the point cloud sequence are still underexplored. To this end, we explore the feasibility of self-supervised motion prediction with only unlabeled LiDAR point clouds. Initially, we employ an optimal transport solver to establish coarse correspondences between current and future point clouds as the coarse pseudo motion labels. Training models directly using such coarse labels leads to noticeable spatial and temporal prediction inconsistencies. To mitigate these issues, we introduce three simple spatial and temporal regularization losses, which facilitate the self-supervised training process effectively. Experimental results demonstrate the significant superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art self-supervised methods.