Underwater Robotic Simulators Review for Autonomous System Development

The increasing complexity of underwater robotic systems has led to a surge in simulation platforms designed to support perception, planning, and control tasks in marine environments. However, selecting the most appropriate underwater robotic simulator (URS) remains a challenge due to wide variations in fidelity, extensibility, and task suitability. This paper presents a comprehensive review and comparative analysis of five state-of-the-art, ROS-compatible, open-source URSs: Stonefish, DAVE, HoloOcean, MARUS, and UNav-Sim. Each simulator is evaluated across multiple criteria including sensor fidelity, environmental realism, sim-to-real capabilities, and research impact. We evaluate them across architectural design, sensor and physics modeling, task capabilities, and research impact. Additionally, we discuss ongoing challenges in sim-to-real transfer and highlight the need for standardization and benchmarking in the field. Our findings aim to guide practitioners in selecting effective simulation environments and inform future development of more robust and transferable URSs.

AVadCLIP: Audio-Visual Collaboration for Robust Video Anomaly Detection

With the increasing adoption of video anomaly detection in intelligent surveillance domains, conventional visual-based detection approaches often struggle with information insufficiency and high false-positive rates in complex environments. To address these limitations, we present a novel weakly supervised framework that leverages audio-visual collaboration for robust video anomaly detection. Capitalizing on the exceptional cross-modal representation learning capabilities of Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) across visual, audio, and textual domains, our framework introduces two major innovations: an efficient audio-visual fusion that enables adaptive cross-modal integration through lightweight parametric adaptation while maintaining the frozen CLIP backbone, and a novel audio-visual prompt that dynamically enhances text embeddings with key multimodal information based on the semantic correlation between audio-visual features and textual labels, significantly improving CLIP's generalization for the video anomaly detection task. Moreover, to enhance robustness against modality deficiency during inference, we further develop an uncertainty-driven feature distillation module that synthesizes audio-visual representations from visual-only inputs. This module employs uncertainty modeling based on the diversity of audio-visual features to dynamically emphasize challenging features during the distillation process. Our framework demonstrates superior performance across multiple benchmarks, with audio integration significantly boosting anomaly detection accuracy in various scenarios. Notably, with unimodal data enhanced by uncertainty-driven distillation, our approach consistently outperforms current unimodal VAD methods.

MegaScale-Infer: Serving Mixture-of-Experts at Scale with Disaggregated Expert Parallelism

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) showcases tremendous potential to scale large language models (LLMs) with enhanced performance and reduced computational complexity. However, its sparsely activated architecture shifts feed-forward networks (FFNs) from being compute-intensive to memory-intensive during inference, leading to substantially lower GPU utilization and increased operational costs. We present MegaScale-Infer, an efficient and cost-effective system for serving large-scale MoE models. MegaScale-Infer disaggregates attention and FFN modules within each model layer, enabling independent scaling, tailored parallelism strategies, and heterogeneous deployment for both modules. To fully exploit disaggregation in the presence of MoE's sparsity, MegaScale-Infer introduces ping-pong pipeline parallelism, which partitions a request batch into micro-batches and shuttles them between attention and FFNs for inference. Combined with distinct model parallelism for each module, MegaScale-Infer effectively hides communication overhead and maximizes GPU utilization. To adapt to disaggregated attention and FFN modules and minimize data transmission overhead (e.g., token dispatch), MegaScale-Infer provides a high-performance M2N communication library that eliminates unnecessary GPU-to-CPU data copies, group initialization overhead, and GPU synchronization. Experimental results indicate that MegaScale-Infer achieves up to 1.90x higher per-GPU throughput than state-of-the-art solutions.

AssistPDA: An Online Video Surveillance Assistant for Video Anomaly Prediction, Detection, and Analysis

The rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have spurred growing interest in LLM-based video anomaly detection (VAD). However, existing approaches predominantly focus on video-level anomaly question answering or offline detection, ignoring the real-time nature essential for practical VAD applications. To bridge this gap and facilitate the practical deployment of LLM-based VAD, we introduce AssistPDA, the first online video anomaly surveillance assistant that unifies video anomaly prediction, detection, and analysis (VAPDA) within a single framework. AssistPDA enables real-time inference on streaming videos while supporting interactive user engagement. Notably, we introduce a novel event-level anomaly prediction task, enabling proactive anomaly forecasting before anomalies fully unfold. To enhance the ability to model intricate spatiotemporal relationships in anomaly events, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Relation Distillation (STRD) module. STRD transfers the long-term spatiotemporal modeling capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs) from offline settings to real-time scenarios. Thus it equips AssistPDA with a robust understanding of complex temporal dependencies and long-sequence memory. Additionally, we construct VAPDA-127K, the first large-scale benchmark designed for VLM-based online VAPDA. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AssistPDA outperforms existing offline VLM-based approaches, setting a new state-of-the-art for real-time VAPDA. Our dataset and code will be open-sourced to facilitate further research in the community.

HVI: A New Color Space for Low-light Image Enhancement

Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) is a crucial computer vision task that aims to restore detailed visual information from corrupted low-light images. Many existing LLIE methods are based on standard RGB (sRGB) space, which often produce color bias and brightness artifacts due to inherent high color sensitivity in sRGB. While converting the images using Hue, Saturation and Value (HSV) color space helps resolve the brightness issue, it introduces significant red and black noise artifacts. To address this issue, we propose a new color space for LLIE, namely Horizontal/Vertical-Intensity (HVI), defined by polarized HS maps and learnable intensity. The former enforces small distances for red coordinates to remove the red artifacts, while the latter compresses the low-light regions to remove the black artifacts. To fully leverage the chromatic and intensity information, a novel Color and Intensity Decoupling Network (CIDNet) is further introduced to learn accurate photometric mapping function under different lighting conditions in the HVI space. Comprehensive results from benchmark and ablation experiments show that the proposed HVI color space with CIDNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on 10 datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Fediory/HVI-CIDNet.

Learning Counterfactual Outcomes Under Rank Preservation

Counterfactual inference aims to estimate the counterfactual outcome at the individual level given knowledge of an observed treatment and the factual outcome, with broad applications in fields such as epidemiology, econometrics, and management science. Previous methods rely on a known structural causal model (SCM) or assume the homogeneity of the exogenous variable and strict monotonicity between the outcome and exogenous variable. In this paper, we propose a principled approach for identifying and estimating the counterfactual outcome. We first introduce a simple and intuitive rank preservation assumption to identify the counterfactual outcome without relying on a known structural causal model. Building on this, we propose a novel ideal loss for theoretically unbiased learning of the counterfactual outcome and further develop a kernel-based estimator for its empirical estimation. Our theoretical analysis shows that the rank preservation assumption is not stronger than the homogeneity and strict monotonicity assumptions, and shows that the proposed ideal loss is convex, and the proposed estimator is unbiased. Extensive semi-synthetic and real-world experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Optimal Policy Adaptation under Covariate Shift

Transfer learning of prediction models has been extensively studied, while the corresponding policy learning approaches are rarely discussed. In this paper, we propose principled approaches for learning the optimal policy in the target domain by leveraging two datasets: one with full information from the source domain and the other from the target domain with only covariates. First, under the setting of covariate shift, we formulate the problem from a perspective of causality and present the identifiability assumptions for the reward induced by a given policy. Then, we derive the efficient influence function and the semiparametric efficiency bound for the reward. Based on this, we construct a doubly robust and semiparametric efficient estimator for the reward and then learn the optimal policy by optimizing the estimated reward. Moreover, we theoretically analyze the bias and the generalization error bound for the learned policy. Furthermore, in the presence of both covariate and concept shifts, we propose a novel sensitivity analysis method to evaluate the robustness of the proposed policy learning approach. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the approach not only estimates the reward more accurately but also yields a policy that closely approximates the theoretically optimal policy.

A Bayesian Framework for Clustered Federated Learning

One of the main challenges of federated learning (FL) is handling non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) client data, which may occur in practice due to unbalanced datasets and use of different data sources across clients. Knowledge sharing and model personalization are key strategies for addressing this issue. Clustered federated learning is a class of FL methods that groups clients that observe similarly distributed data into clusters, such that every client is typically associated with one data distribution and participates in training a model for that distribution along their cluster peers. In this paper, we present a unified Bayesian framework for clustered FL which associates clients to clusters. Then we propose several practical algorithms to handle the, otherwise growing, data associations in a way that trades off performance and computational complexity. This work provides insights on client-cluster associations and enables client knowledge sharing in new ways. The proposed framework circumvents the need for unique client-cluster associations, which is seen to increase the performance of the resulting models in a variety of experiments.

Symmetry Nonnegative Matrix Factorization Algorithm Based on Self-paced Learning

A symmetric nonnegative matrix factorization algorithm based on self-paced learning was proposed to improve the clustering performance of the model. It could make the model better distinguish normal samples from abnormal samples in an error-driven way. A weight variable that could measure the degree of difficulty to all samples was assigned in this method, and the variable was constrained by adopting both hard-weighting and soft-weighting strategies to ensure the rationality of the model. Cluster analysis was carried out on multiple data sets such as images and texts, and the experimental results showed the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Bayesian data fusion for distributed learning

One of the main challenges of federated learning (FL) is handling non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) client data, which may occur in practice due to unbalanced datasets and use of different data sources across clients. Knowledge sharing and model personalization are key strategies for addressing this issue. Clustered federated learning is a class of FL methods that groups clients that observe similarly distributed data into clusters, such that every client is typically associated with one data distribution and participates in training a model for that distribution along their cluster peers. In this paper, we present a unified Bayesian framework for clustered FL which associates clients to clusters. Then we propose several practical algorithms to handle the, otherwise growing, data associations in a way that trades off performance and computational complexity. This work provides insights on client-cluster associations and enables client knowledge sharing in new ways. The proposed framework circumvents the need for unique client-cluster associations, which is seen to increase the performance of the resulting models in a variety of experiments.