InsightDrive: Insight Scene Representation for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Directly generating planning results from raw sensors has become increasingly prevalent due to its adaptability and robustness in complex scenarios. Scene representation, as a key module in the pipeline, has traditionally relied on conventional perception, which focus on the global scene. However, in driving scenarios, human drivers typically focus only on regions that directly impact driving, which often coincide with those required for end-to-end autonomous driving. In this paper, a novel end-to-end autonomous driving method called InsightDrive is proposed, which organizes perception by language-guided scene representation. We introduce an instance-centric scene tokenizer that transforms the surrounding environment into map- and object-aware instance tokens. Scene attention language descriptions, which highlight key regions and obstacles affecting the ego vehicle's movement, are generated by a vision-language model that leverages the cognitive reasoning capabilities of foundation models. We then align scene descriptions with visual features using the vision-language model, guiding visual attention through these descriptions to give effectively scene representation. Furthermore, we employ self-attention and cross-attention mechanisms to model the ego-agents and ego-map relationships to comprehensively build the topological relationships of the scene. Finally, based on scene understanding, we jointly perform motion prediction and planning. Extensive experiments on the widely used nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that the proposed InsightDrive achieves state-of-the-art performance in end-to-end autonomous driving. The code is available at https://github.com/songruiqi/InsightDrive

Towards Better Alignment: Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning Against Sparse Rewards

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in text-to-image generation. However, their practical applications are hindered by the misalignment between generated images and corresponding text prompts. To tackle this issue, reinforcement learning (RL) has been considered for diffusion model fine-tuning. Yet, RL's effectiveness is limited by the challenge of sparse reward, where feedback is only available at the end of the generation process. This makes it difficult to identify which actions during the denoising process contribute positively to the final generated image, potentially leading to ineffective or unnecessary denoising policies. To this end, this paper presents a novel RL-based framework that addresses the sparse reward problem when training diffusion models. Our framework, named $\text{B}^2\text{-DiffuRL}$, employs two strategies: \textbf{B}ackward progressive training and \textbf{B}ranch-based sampling. For one thing, backward progressive training focuses initially on the final timesteps of denoising process and gradually extends the training interval to earlier timesteps, easing the learning difficulty from sparse rewards. For another, we perform branch-based sampling for each training interval. By comparing the samples within the same branch, we can identify how much the policies of the current training interval contribute to the final image, which helps to learn effective policies instead of unnecessary ones. $\text{B}^2\text{-DiffuRL}$ is compatible with existing optimization algorithms. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of $\text{B}^2\text{-DiffuRL}$ in improving prompt-image alignment and maintaining diversity in generated images. The code for this work is available.

Cyclic Contrastive Knowledge Transfer for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

In pursuit of detecting unstinted objects that extend beyond predefined categories, prior arts of open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) typically resort to pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) for base-to-novel category generalization. However, to mitigate the misalignment between upstream image-text pretraining and downstream region-level perception, additional supervisions are indispensable, eg, image-text pairs or pseudo annotations generated via self-training strategies. In this work, we propose CCKT-Det trained without any extra supervision. The proposed framework constructs a cyclic and dynamic knowledge transfer from language queries and visual region features extracted from VLMs, which forces the detector to closely align with the visual-semantic space of VLMs. Specifically, 1) we prefilter and inject semantic priors to guide the learning of queries, and 2) introduce a regional contrastive loss to improve the awareness of queries on novel objects. CCKT-Det can consistently improve performance as the scale of VLMs increases, all while requiring the detector at a moderate level of computation overhead. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves performance gain of +2.9% and +10.2% AP50 over previous state-of-the-arts on the challenging COCO benchmark, both without and with a stronger teacher model. The code is provided at https://github.com/ZCHUHan/CCKT-Det.

SimLingo: Vision-Only Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Language-Action Alignment

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into autonomous driving has attracted significant attention with the hope of improving generalization and explainability. However, existing methods often focus on either driving or vision-language understanding but achieving both high driving performance and extensive language understanding remains challenging. In addition, the dominant approach to tackle vision-language understanding is using visual question answering. However, for autonomous driving, this is only useful if it is aligned with the action space. Otherwise, the model's answers could be inconsistent with its behavior. Therefore, we propose a model that can handle three different tasks: (1) closed-loop driving, (2) vision-language understanding, and (3) language-action alignment. Our model SimLingo is based on a vision language model (VLM) and works using only camera, excluding expensive sensors like LiDAR. SimLingo obtains state-of-the-art performance on the widely used CARLA simulator on the Bench2Drive benchmark and is the winning entry at the CARLA challenge 2024. Additionally, we achieve strong results in a wide variety of language-related tasks while maintaining high driving performance.

WMNav: Integrating Vision-Language Models into World Models for Object Goal Navigation

Object Goal Navigation-requiring an agent to locate a specific object in an unseen environment-remains a core challenge in embodied AI. Although recent progress in Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based agents has demonstrated promising perception and decision-making abilities through prompting, none has yet established a fully modular world model design that reduces risky and costly interactions with the environment by predicting the future state of the world. We introduce WMNav, a novel World Model-based Navigation framework powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs). It predicts possible outcomes of decisions and builds memories to provide feedback to the policy module. To retain the predicted state of the environment, WMNav proposes the online maintained Curiosity Value Map as part of the world model memory to provide dynamic configuration for navigation policy. By decomposing according to a human-like thinking process, WMNav effectively alleviates the impact of model hallucination by making decisions based on the feedback difference between the world model plan and observation. To further boost efficiency, we implement a two-stage action proposer strategy: broad exploration followed by precise localization. Extensive evaluation on HM3D and MP3D validates WMNav surpasses existing zero-shot benchmarks in both success rate and exploration efficiency (absolute improvement: +3.2% SR and +3.2% SPL on HM3D, +13.5% SR and +1.1% SPL on MP3D). Project page: https://b0b8k1ng.github.io/WMNav/.

Tuning-Free Structured Sparse PCA via Deep Unfolding Networks

Sparse principal component analysis (PCA) is a well-established dimensionality reduction technique that is often used for unsupervised feature selection (UFS). However, determining the regularization parameters is rather challenging, and conventional approaches, including grid search and Bayesian optimization, not only bring great computational costs but also exhibit high sensitivity. To address these limitations, we first establish a structured sparse PCA formulation by integrating $\ell_1$-norm and $\ell_{2,1}$-norm to capture the local and global structures, respectively. Building upon the off-the-shelf alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) optimization framework, we then design an interpretable deep unfolding network that translates iterative optimization steps into trainable neural architectures. This innovation enables automatic learning of the regularization parameters, effectively bypassing the empirical tuning requirements of conventional methods. Numerical experiments on benchmark datasets validate the advantages of our proposed method over the existing state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be accessible at https://github.com/xianchaoxiu/SPCA-Net.

Learning Humanoid Locomotion with World Model Reconstruction

Humanoid robots are designed to navigate environments accessible to humans using their legs. However, classical research has primarily focused on controlled laboratory settings, resulting in a gap in developing controllers for navigating complex real-world terrains. This challenge mainly arises from the limitations and noise in sensor data, which hinder the robot's understanding of itself and the environment. In this study, we introduce World Model Reconstruction (WMR), an end-to-end learning-based approach for blind humanoid locomotion across challenging terrains. We propose training an estimator to explicitly reconstruct the world state and utilize it to enhance the locomotion policy. The locomotion policy takes inputs entirely from the reconstructed information. The policy and the estimator are trained jointly; however, the gradient between them is intentionally cut off. This ensures that the estimator focuses solely on world reconstruction, independent of the locomotion policy's updates. We evaluated our model on rough, deformable, and slippery surfaces in real-world scenarios, demonstrating robust adaptability and resistance to interference. The robot successfully completed a 3.2 km hike without any human assistance, mastering terrains covered with ice and snow.

SleepGMUformer: A gated multimodal temporal neural network for sleep staging

Sleep staging is a key method for assessing sleep quality and diagnosing sleep disorders. However, current deep learning methods face challenges: 1) postfusion techniques ignore the varying contributions of different modalities; 2) unprocessed sleep data can interfere with frequency-domain information. To tackle these issues, this paper proposes a gated multimodal temporal neural network for multidomain sleep data, including heart rate, motion, steps, EEG (Fpz-Cz, Pz-Oz), and EOG from WristHR-Motion-Sleep and SleepEDF-78. The model integrates: 1) a pre-processing module for feature alignment, missing value handling, and EEG de-trending; 2) a feature extraction module for complex sleep features in the time dimension; and 3) a dynamic fusion module for real-time modality weighting.Experiments show classification accuracies of 85.03% on SleepEDF-78 and 94.54% on WristHR-Motion-Sleep datasets. The model handles heterogeneous datasets and outperforms state-of-the-art models by 1.00%-4.00%.

Neuromorphic Readout for Hadron Calorimeters

We simulate hadrons impinging on a homogeneous lead-tungstate (PbWO4) calorimeter to investigate how the resulting light yield and its temporal structure, as detected by an array of light-sensitive sensors, can be processed by a neuromorphic computing system. Our model encodes temporal photon distributions as spike trains and employs a fully connected spiking neural network to estimate the total deposited energy, as well as the position and spatial distribution of the light emissions within the sensitive material. The extracted primitives offer valuable topological information about the shower development in the material, achieved without requiring a segmentation of the active medium. A potential nanophotonic implementation using III-V semiconductor nanowires is discussed. It can be both fast and energy efficient.

KARST: Multi-Kernel Kronecker Adaptation with Re-Scaling Transmission for Visual Classification

Fine-tuning pre-trained vision models for specific tasks is a common practice in computer vision. However, this process becomes more expensive as models grow larger. Recently, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have emerged as a popular solution to improve training efficiency and reduce storage needs by tuning additional low-rank modules within pre-trained backbones. Despite their advantages, they struggle with limited representation capabilities and misalignment with pre-trained intermediate features. To address these issues, we introduce an innovative Multi-Kernel Kronecker Adaptation with Re-Scaling Transmission (KARST) for various recognition tasks. Specifically, its multi-kernel design extends Kronecker projections horizontally and separates adaptation matrices into multiple complementary spaces, reducing parameter dependency and creating more compact subspaces. Besides, it incorporates extra learnable re-scaling factors to better align with pre-trained feature distributions, allowing for more flexible and balanced feature aggregation. Extensive experiments validate that our KARST outperforms other PEFT counterparts with a negligible inference cost due to its re-parameterization characteristics. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Lucenova/KARST.