Aligned Vector Quantization for Edge-Cloud Collabrative Vision-Language Models

Vision Language Models (VLMs) are central to Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems and are typically deployed in the cloud due to their high computational demands. However, this cloud-only approach underutilizes edge computational resources and requires significant bandwidth for transmitting raw images. In this paper, we introduce an edge-cloud collaborative VQA system, called LLaVA-AlignedVQ, which features a novel Aligned Vector Quantization algorithm (AlignedVQ) that efficiently compress intermediate features without compromising accuracy to support partitioned execution. Our experiments demonstrate that LLaVA-AlignedVQ achieves approximately 1365x compression rate of intermediate features, reducing data transmission overhead by 96.8% compared to transmitting JPEG90-compressed images to the cloud. LLaVA-AlignedVQ achieves an inference speedup of 2-15x while maintaining high accuracy, remaining within -2.23% to +1.6% of the original model's accuracy performance across eight VQA datasets, compared to the cloud-only solution.

GITSR: Graph Interaction Transformer-based Scene Representation for Multi Vehicle Collaborative Decision-making

In this study, we propose GITSR, an effective framework for Graph Interaction Transformer-based Scene Representation for multi-vehicle collaborative decision-making in intelligent transportation system. In the context of mixed traffic where Connected Automated Vehicles (CAVs) and Human Driving Vehicles (HDVs) coexist, in order to enhance the understanding of the environment by CAVs to improve decision-making capabilities, this framework focuses on efficient scene representation and the modeling of spatial interaction behaviors of traffic states. We first extract features of the driving environment based on the background of intelligent networking. Subsequently, the local scene representation, which is based on the agent-centric and dynamic occupation grid, is calculated by the Transformer module. Besides, feasible region of the map is captured through the multi-head attention mechanism to reduce the collision of vehicles. Notably, spatial interaction behaviors, based on motion information, are modeled as graph structures and extracted via Graph Neural Network (GNN). Ultimately, the collaborative decision-making among multiple vehicles is formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), with driving actions output by Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. Our algorithmic validation is executed within the extremely challenging scenario of highway off-ramp task, thereby substantiating the superiority of agent-centric approach to scene representation. Simulation results demonstrate that the GITSR method can not only effectively capture scene representation but also extract spatial interaction data, outperforming the baseline method across various comparative metrics.

Generalizability of Memorization Neural Networks

The neural network memorization problem is to study the expressive power of neural networks to interpolate a finite dataset. Although memorization is widely believed to have a close relationship with the strong generalizability of deep learning when using over-parameterized models, to the best of our knowledge, there exists no theoretical study on the generalizability of memorization neural networks. In this paper, we give the first theoretical analysis of this topic. Since using i.i.d. training data is a necessary condition for a learning algorithm to be generalizable, memorization and its generalization theory for i.i.d. datasets are developed under mild conditions on the data distribution. First, algorithms are given to construct memorization networks for an i.i.d. dataset, which have the smallest number of parameters and even a constant number of parameters. Second, we show that, in order for the memorization networks to be generalizable, the width of the network must be at least equal to the dimension of the data, which implies that the existing memorization networks with an optimal number of parameters are not generalizable. Third, a lower bound for the sample complexity of general memorization algorithms and the exact sample complexity for memorization algorithms with constant number of parameters are given. It is also shown that there exist data distributions such that, to be generalizable for them, the memorization network must have an exponential number of parameters in the data dimension. Finally, an efficient and generalizable memorization algorithm is given when the number of training samples is greater than the efficient memorization sample complexity of the data distribution.

Out-of-Bounding-Box Triggers: A Stealthy Approach to Cheat Object Detectors

In recent years, the study of adversarial robustness in object detection systems, particularly those based on deep neural networks (DNNs), has become a pivotal area of research. Traditional physical attacks targeting object detectors, such as adversarial patches and texture manipulations, directly manipulate the surface of the object. While these methods are effective, their overt manipulation of objects may draw attention in real-world applications. To address this, this paper introduces a more subtle approach: an inconspicuous adversarial trigger that operates outside the bounding boxes, rendering the object undetectable to the model. We further enhance this approach by proposing the Feature Guidance (FG) technique and the Universal Auto-PGD (UAPGD) optimization strategy for crafting high-quality triggers. The effectiveness of our method is validated through extensive empirical testing, demonstrating its high performance in both digital and physical environments. The code and video will be available at: https://github.com/linToTao/Out-of-bbox-attack.

Dual Consolidation for Pre-Trained Model-Based Domain-Incremental Learning

Domain-Incremental Learning (DIL) involves the progressive adaptation of a model to new concepts across different domains. While recent advances in pre-trained models provide a solid foundation for DIL, learning new concepts often results in the catastrophic forgetting of pre-trained knowledge. Specifically, sequential model updates can overwrite both the representation and the classifier with knowledge from the latest domain. Thus, it is crucial to develop a representation and corresponding classifier that accommodate all seen domains throughout the learning process. To this end, we propose DUal ConsolidaTion (Duct) to unify and consolidate historical knowledge at both the representation and classifier levels. By merging the backbone of different stages, we create a representation space suitable for multiple domains incrementally. The merged representation serves as a balanced intermediary that captures task-specific features from all seen domains. Additionally, to address the mismatch between consolidated embeddings and the classifier, we introduce an extra classifier consolidation process. Leveraging class-wise semantic information, we estimate the classifier weights of old domains within the latest embedding space. By merging historical and estimated classifiers, we align them with the consolidated embedding space, facilitating incremental classification. Extensive experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate Duct's state-of-the-art performance.

Underwater Image Enhancement via Dehazing and Color Restoration

With the rapid development of marine engineering projects such as marine resource extraction and oceanic surveys, underwater visual imaging and analysis has become a critical technology. Unfortunately, due to the inevitable non-linear attenuation of light in underwater environments, underwater images and videos often suffer from low contrast, blurriness, and color degradation, which significantly complicate the subsequent research. Existing underwater image enhancement methods often treat the haze and color cast as a unified degradation process and disregard their independence and interdependence, which limits the performance improvement. Here, we propose a Vision Transformer (ViT)-based network (referred to as WaterFormer) to improve the underwater image quality. WaterFormer contains three major components: a dehazing block (DehazeFormer Block) to capture the self-correlated haze features and extract deep-level features, a Color Restoration Block (CRB) to capture self-correlated color cast features, and a Channel Fusion Block (CFB) to capture fusion features within the network. To ensure authenticity, a soft reconstruction layer based on the underwater imaging physics model is included. To improve the quality of the enhanced images, we introduce the Chromatic Consistency Loss and Sobel Color Loss to train the network. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that WaterFormer outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in enhancing underwater images.

Knowledge Distillation via Query Selection for Detection Transformer

Transformers have revolutionized the object detection landscape by introducing DETRs, acclaimed for their simplicity and efficacy. Despite their advantages, the substantial size of these models poses significant challenges for practical deployment, particularly in resource-constrained environments. This paper addresses the challenge of compressing DETR by leveraging knowledge distillation, a technique that holds promise for maintaining model performance while reducing size. A critical aspect of DETRs' performance is their reliance on queries to interpret object representations accurately. Traditional distillation methods often focus exclusively on positive queries, identified through bipartite matching, neglecting the rich information present in hard-negative queries. Our visual analysis indicates that hard-negative queries, focusing on foreground elements, are crucial for enhancing distillation outcomes. To this end, we introduce a novel Group Query Selection strategy, which diverges from traditional query selection in DETR distillation by segmenting queries based on their Generalized Intersection over Union (GIoU) with ground truth objects, thereby uncovering valuable hard-negative queries for distillation. Furthermore, we present the Knowledge Distillation via Query Selection for DETR (QSKD) framework, which incorporates Attention-Guided Feature Distillation (AGFD) and Local Alignment Prediction Distillation (LAPD). These components optimize the distillation process by focusing on the most informative aspects of the teacher model's intermediate features and output. Our comprehensive experimental evaluation of the MS-COCO dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach, significantly improving average precision (AP) across various DETR architectures without incurring substantial computational costs. Specifically, the AP of Conditional DETR ResNet-18 increased from 35.8 to 39.9.

A Plug-and-Play Method for Rare Human-Object Interactions Detection by Bridging Domain Gap

Human-object interactions (HOI) detection aims at capturing human-object pairs in images and corresponding actions. It is an important step toward high-level visual reasoning and scene understanding. However, due to the natural bias from the real world, existing methods mostly struggle with rare human-object pairs and lead to sub-optimal results. Recently, with the development of the generative model, a straightforward approach is to construct a more balanced dataset based on a group of supplementary samples. Unfortunately, there is a significant domain gap between the generated data and the original data, and simply merging the generated images into the original dataset cannot significantly boost the performance. To alleviate the above problem, we present a novel model-agnostic framework called \textbf{C}ontext-\textbf{E}nhanced \textbf{F}eature \textbf{A}lignment (CEFA) module, which can effectively align the generated data with the original data at the feature level and bridge the domain gap. Specifically, CEFA consists of a feature alignment module and a context enhancement module. On one hand, considering the crucial role of human-object pairs information in HOI tasks, the feature alignment module aligns the human-object pairs by aggregating instance information. On the other hand, to mitigate the issue of losing important context information caused by the traditional discriminator-style alignment method, we employ a context-enhanced image reconstruction module to improve the model's learning ability of contextual cues. Extensive experiments have shown that our method can serve as a plug-and-play module to improve the detection performance of HOI models on rare categories\footnote{https://github.com/LijunZhang01/CEFA}.

Invariant Correlation of Representation with Label

The Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) approach aims to address the challenge of domain generalization by training a feature representation that remains invariant across multiple environments. However, in noisy environments, IRM-related techniques such as IRMv1 and VREx may be unable to achieve the optimal IRM solution, primarily due to erroneous optimization directions. To address this issue, we introduce ICorr (an abbreviation for \textbf{I}nvariant \textbf{Corr}elation), a novel approach designed to surmount the above challenge in noisy settings. Additionally, we dig into a case study to analyze why previous methods may lose ground while ICorr can succeed. Through a theoretical lens, particularly from a causality perspective, we illustrate that the invariant correlation of representation with label is a necessary condition for the optimal invariant predictor in noisy environments, whereas the optimization motivations for other methods may not be. Furthermore, we empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of ICorr by comparing it with other domain generalization methods on various noisy datasets.

Asynchronous Large Language Model Enhanced Planner for Autonomous Driving

Despite real-time planners exhibiting remarkable performance in autonomous driving, the growing exploration of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened avenues for enhancing the interpretability and controllability of motion planning. Nevertheless, LLM-based planners continue to encounter significant challenges, including elevated resource consumption and extended inference times, which pose substantial obstacles to practical deployment. In light of these challenges, we introduce AsyncDriver, a new asynchronous LLM-enhanced closed-loop framework designed to leverage scene-associated instruction features produced by LLM to guide real-time planners in making precise and controllable trajectory predictions. On one hand, our method highlights the prowess of LLMs in comprehending and reasoning with vectorized scene data and a series of routing instructions, demonstrating its effective assistance to real-time planners. On the other hand, the proposed framework decouples the inference processes of the LLM and real-time planners. By capitalizing on the asynchronous nature of their inference frequencies, our approach have successfully reduced the computational cost introduced by LLM, while maintaining comparable performance. Experiments show that our approach achieves superior closed-loop evaluation performance on nuPlan's challenging scenarios.