Driving-RAG: Driving Scenarios Embedding, Search, and RAG Applications

Driving scenario data play an increasingly vital role in the development of intelligent vehicles and autonomous driving. Accurate and efficient scenario data search is critical for both online vehicle decision-making and planning, and offline scenario generation and simulations, as it allows for leveraging the scenario experiences to improve the overall performance. Especially with the application of large language models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented-Generation (RAG) systems in autonomous driving, urgent requirements are put forward. In this paper, we introduce the Driving-RAG framework to address the challenges of efficient scenario data embedding, search, and applications for RAG systems. Our embedding model aligns fundamental scenario information and scenario distance metrics in the vector space. The typical scenario sampling method combined with hierarchical navigable small world can perform efficient scenario vector search to achieve high efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. In addition, the reorganization mechanism by graph knowledge enhances the relevance to the prompt scenarios and augment LLM generation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on typical trajectory planning task for complex interactive scenarios such as ramps and intersections, showcasing its advantages for RAG applications.

Towards Understanding the Optimization Mechanisms in Deep Learning

In this paper, we adopt a probability distribution estimation perspective to explore the optimization mechanisms of supervised classification using deep neural networks. We demonstrate that, when employing the Fenchel-Young loss, despite the non-convex nature of the fitting error with respect to the model's parameters, global optimal solutions can be approximated by simultaneously minimizing both the gradient norm and the structural error. The former can be controlled through gradient descent algorithms. For the latter, we prove that it can be managed by increasing the number of parameters and ensuring parameter independence, thereby providing theoretical insights into mechanisms such as over-parameterization and random initialization. Ultimately, the paper validates the key conclusions of the proposed method through empirical results, illustrating its practical effectiveness.

Multi-Scale Invertible Neural Network for Wide-Range Variable-Rate Learned Image Compression

Autoencoder-based structures have dominated recent learned image compression methods. However, the inherent information loss associated with autoencoders limits their rate-distortion performance at high bit rates and restricts their flexibility of rate adaptation. In this paper, we present a variable-rate image compression model based on invertible transform to overcome these limitations. Specifically, we design a lightweight multi-scale invertible neural network, which bijectively maps the input image into multi-scale latent representations. To improve the compression efficiency, a multi-scale spatial-channel context model with extended gain units is devised to estimate the entropy of the latent representation from high to low levels. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing variable-rate methods, and remains competitive with recent multi-model approaches. Notably, our method is the first learned image compression solution that outperforms VVC across a very wide range of bit rates using a single model, especially at high bit rates.The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/hytu99/MSINN-VRLIC}{https://github.com/hytu99/MSINN-VRLIC}.

Equivariant Image Modeling

Current generative models, such as autoregressive and diffusion approaches, decompose high-dimensional data distribution learning into a series of simpler subtasks. However, inherent conflicts arise during the joint optimization of these subtasks, and existing solutions fail to resolve such conflicts without sacrificing efficiency or scalability. We propose a novel equivariant image modeling framework that inherently aligns optimization targets across subtasks by leveraging the translation invariance of natural visual signals. Our method introduces (1) column-wise tokenization which enhances translational symmetry along the horizontal axis, and (2) windowed causal attention which enforces consistent contextual relationships across positions. Evaluated on class-conditioned ImageNet generation at 256x256 resolution, our approach achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art AR models while using fewer computational resources. Systematic analysis demonstrates that enhanced equivariance reduces inter-task conflicts, significantly improving zero-shot generalization and enabling ultra-long image synthesis. This work establishes the first framework for task-aligned decomposition in generative modeling, offering insights into efficient parameter sharing and conflict-free optimization. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/drx-code/EquivariantModeling.

TFDM: Time-Variant Frequency-Based Point Cloud Diffusion with Mamba

Diffusion models currently demonstrate impressive performance over various generative tasks. Recent work on image diffusion highlights the strong capabilities of Mamba (state space models) due to its efficient handling of long-range dependencies and sequential data modeling. Unfortunately, joint consideration of state space models with 3D point cloud generation remains limited. To harness the powerful capabilities of the Mamba model for 3D point cloud generation, we propose a novel diffusion framework containing dual latent Mamba block (DM-Block) and a time-variant frequency encoder (TF-Encoder). The DM-Block apply a space-filling curve to reorder points into sequences suitable for Mamba state-space modeling, while operating in a latent space to mitigate the computational overhead that arises from direct 3D data processing. Meanwhile, the TF-Encoder takes advantage of the ability of the diffusion model to refine fine details in later recovery stages by prioritizing key points within the U-Net architecture. This frequency-based mechanism ensures enhanced detail quality in the final stages of generation. Experimental results on the ShapeNet-v2 dataset demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance (ShapeNet-v2: 0.14\% on 1-NNA-Abs50 EMD and 57.90\% on COV EMD) on certain metrics for specific categories while reducing computational parameters and inference time by up to 10$\times$ and 9$\times$, respectively. Source code is available in Supplementary Materials and will be released upon accpetance.

A Survey on Federated Fine-tuning of Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of tasks, with fine-tuning playing a pivotal role in adapting them to specific downstream applications. Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising approach that enables collaborative model adaptation while ensuring data privacy, i.e., FedLLM. In this survey, we provide a systematic and thorough review of the integration of LLMs with FL. Specifically, we first trace the historical evolution of both LLMs and FL, while summarizing relevant prior surveys. We then present an in-depth analysis of the fundamental challenges encountered in deploying FedLLM. Following this, we conduct an extensive study of existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods and explore their applicability in FL. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation benchmark to rigorously assess FedLLM performance and discuss its diverse real-world applications across multiple domains. Finally, we identify critical open challenges and outline promising research directions to drive future advancements in FedLLM. We maintain an active \href{https://github.com/Clin0212/Awesome-Federated-LLM-Learning}{GitHub repository} tracking cutting-edge advancements. This survey serves as a foundational resource for researchers and practitioners, offering insights into the evolving landscape of federated fine-tuning for LLMs while guiding future innovations in privacy-preserving AI.

DeFine: A Decomposed and Fine-Grained Annotated Dataset for Long-form Article Generation

Long-form article generation (LFAG) presents challenges such as maintaining logical consistency, comprehensive topic coverage, and narrative coherence across extended articles. Existing datasets often lack both the hierarchical structure and fine-grained annotation needed to effectively decompose tasks, resulting in shallow, disorganized article generation. To address these limitations, we introduce DeFine, a Decomposed and Fine-grained annotated dataset for long-form article generation. DeFine is characterized by its hierarchical decomposition strategy and the integration of domain-specific knowledge with multi-level annotations, ensuring granular control and enhanced depth in article generation. To construct the dataset, a multi-agent collaborative pipeline is proposed, which systematically segments the generation process into four parts: Data Miner, Cite Retreiver, Q&A Annotator and Data Cleaner. To validate the effectiveness of DeFine, we designed and tested three LFAG baselines: the web retrieval, the local retrieval, and the grounded reference. We fine-tuned the Qwen2-7b-Instruct model using the DeFine training dataset. The experimental results showed significant improvements in text quality, specifically in topic coverage, depth of information, and content fidelity. Our dataset publicly available to facilitate future research.

Treble Counterfactual VLMs: A Causal Approach to Hallucination

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have advanced multi-modal tasks like image captioning, visual question answering, and reasoning. However, they often generate hallucinated outputs inconsistent with the visual context or prompt, limiting reliability in critical applications like autonomous driving and medical imaging. Existing studies link hallucination to statistical biases, language priors, and biased feature learning but lack a structured causal understanding. In this work, we introduce a causal perspective to analyze and mitigate hallucination in VLMs. We hypothesize that hallucination arises from unintended direct influences of either the vision or text modality, bypassing proper multi-modal fusion. To address this, we construct a causal graph for VLMs and employ counterfactual analysis to estimate the Natural Direct Effect (NDE) of vision, text, and their cross-modal interaction on the output. We systematically identify and mitigate these unintended direct effects to ensure that responses are primarily driven by genuine multi-modal fusion. Our approach consists of three steps: (1) designing structural causal graphs to distinguish correct fusion pathways from spurious modality shortcuts, (2) estimating modality-specific and cross-modal NDE using perturbed image representations, hallucinated text embeddings, and degraded visual inputs, and (3) implementing a test-time intervention module to dynamically adjust the model's dependence on each modality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly reduces hallucination while preserving task performance, providing a robust and interpretable framework for improving VLM reliability. To enhance accessibility and reproducibility, our code is publicly available at https://github.com/TREE985/Treble-Counterfactual-VLMs.

Secure On-Device Video OOD Detection Without Backpropagation

Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection is critical for ensuring the reliability of machine learning models in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and medical diagnosis. While deploying personalized OOD detection directly on edge devices is desirable, it remains challenging due to large model sizes and the computational infeasibility of on-device training. Federated learning partially addresses this but still requires gradient computation and backpropagation, exceeding the capabilities of many edge devices. To overcome these challenges, we propose SecDOOD, a secure cloud-device collaboration framework for efficient on-device OOD detection without requiring device-side backpropagation. SecDOOD utilizes cloud resources for model training while ensuring user data privacy by retaining sensitive information on-device. Central to SecDOOD is a HyperNetwork-based personalized parameter generation module, which adapts cloud-trained models to device-specific distributions by dynamically generating local weight adjustments, effectively combining central and local information without local fine-tuning. Additionally, our dynamic feature sampling and encryption strategy selectively encrypts only the most informative feature channels, largely reducing encryption overhead without compromising detection performance. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and OOD scenarios demonstrate that SecDOOD achieves performance comparable to fully fine-tuned models, enabling secure, efficient, and personalized OOD detection on resource-limited edge devices. To enhance accessibility and reproducibility, our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Dystopians/SecDOOD.

AsymLoRA: Harmonizing Data Conflicts and Commonalities in MLLMs

Effective instruction fine-tuning on diverse image-text datasets is crucial for developing a versatile Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM), where dataset composition dictates the model's adaptability across multimodal tasks. However, complex datasets often contain inherent conflicts -- stemming from modality-specific optimization objectives -- and latent commonalities that enable cross-task transfer, which most existing approaches handle separately. To bridge this gap, we introduce AsymLoRA, a parameter-efficient tuning framework that unifies knowledge modularization and cross-modal coordination via asymmetric LoRA: task-specific low-rank projections (matrix B) that preserve distinct adaptation pathways for conflicting objectives, and a shared projection (matrix A) that consolidates cross-modal commonalities. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that AsymLoRA consistently surpasses both vanilla LoRA, which captures only commonalities, and LoRA-MoE, which focuses solely on conflicts, achieving superior model performance and system efficiency across diverse benchmarks.\href{Code}{https://github.com/Clin0212/HydraLoRA/blob/main/MLLM-HydraLoRA/README.md}.