SR-LIO++: Efficient LiDAR-Inertial Odometry and Quantized Mapping with Sweep Reconstruction

Addressing the inherent low acquisition frequency limitation of 3D LiDAR to achieve high-frequency output has become a critical research focus in the LiDAR-Inertial Odometry (LIO) domain. To ensure real-time performance, frequency-enhanced LIO systems must process each sweep within significantly reduced timeframe, which presents substantial challenges for deployment on low-computational-power platforms. To address these limitations, we introduce SR-LIO++, an innovative LIO system capable of achieving doubled output frequency relative to input frequency on resource-constrained hardware platforms, including the Raspberry Pi 4B. Our system employs a sweep reconstruction methodology to enhance LiDAR sweep frequency, generating high-frequency reconstructed sweeps. Building upon this foundation, we propose a caching mechanism for intermediate results (i.e., surface parameters) of the most recent segments, effectively minimizing redundant processing of common segments in adjacent reconstructed sweeps. This method decouples processing time from the traditionally linear dependence on reconstructed sweep frequency. Furthermore, we present a quantized map point management based on index table mapping, significantly reducing memory usage by converting global 3D point storage from 64-bit double precision to 8-bit char representation. This method also converts the computationally intensive Euclidean distance calculations in nearest neighbor searches from 64-bit double precision to 16-bit short and 32-bit integer formats, significantly reducing both memory and computational cost. Extensive experimental evaluations across three distinct computing platforms and four public datasets demonstrate that SR-LIO++ maintains state-of-the-art accuracy while substantially enhancing efficiency. Notably, our system successfully achieves 20Hz state output on Raspberry Pi 4B hardware.

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.

Memory Efficient Transformer Adapter for Dense Predictions

While current Vision Transformer (ViT) adapter methods have shown promising accuracy, their inference speed is implicitly hindered by inefficient memory access operations, e.g., standard normalization and frequent reshaping. In this work, we propose META, a simple and fast ViT adapter that can improve the model's memory efficiency and decrease memory time consumption by reducing the inefficient memory access operations. Our method features a memory-efficient adapter block that enables the common sharing of layer normalization between the self-attention and feed-forward network layers, thereby reducing the model's reliance on normalization operations. Within the proposed block, the cross-shaped self-attention is employed to reduce the model's frequent reshaping operations. Moreover, we augment the adapter block with a lightweight convolutional branch that can enhance local inductive biases, particularly beneficial for the dense prediction tasks, e.g., object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. The adapter block is finally formulated in a cascaded manner to compute diverse head features, thereby enriching the variety of feature representations. Empirically, extensive evaluations on multiple representative datasets validate that META substantially enhances the predicted quality, while achieving a new state-of-the-art accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Theoretically, we demonstrate that META exhibits superior generalization capability and stronger adaptability.

Genetic Quantization-Aware Approximation for Non-Linear Operations in Transformers

Non-linear functions are prevalent in Transformers and their lightweight variants, incurring substantial and frequently underestimated hardware costs. Previous state-of-the-art works optimize these operations by piece-wise linear approximation and store the parameters in look-up tables (LUT), but most of them require unfriendly high-precision arithmetics such as FP/INT 32 and lack consideration of integer-only INT quantization. This paper proposed a genetic LUT-Approximation algorithm namely GQA-LUT that can automatically determine the parameters with quantization awareness. The results demonstrate that GQA-LUT achieves negligible degradation on the challenging semantic segmentation task for both vanilla and linear Transformer models. Besides, proposed GQA-LUT enables the employment of INT8-based LUT-Approximation that achieves an area savings of 81.3~81.7% and a power reduction of 79.3~80.2% compared to the high-precision FP/INT 32 alternatives. Code is available at https:// github.com/PingchengDong/GQA-LUT.

Boundary and Relation Distillation for Semantic Segmentation

Recently, it has been revealed that small semantic segmentation (SS) models exhibit a tendency to make errors in maintaining boundary region completeness and preserving target region connectivity, despite their effective segmentation of the main object regions. To address these errors, we propose a targeted boundary and relation distillation (BRD) strategy using knowledge distillation from large teacher models to small student models. Specifically, the boundary distillation extracts explicit object boundaries from the hierarchical feature maps of the backbone network, subsequently enhancing the student model's mask quality in boundary regions. Concurrently, the relation distillation transfers implicit relations from the teacher model to the student model using pixel-level self-relation as a bridge, ensuring that the student's mask has strong target region connectivity. The proposed BRD is designed concretely for SS and is characterized by simplicity and efficiency. Through experimental evaluations on multiple SS datasets, including Pascal VOC 2012, Cityscapes, ADE20K, and COCO-Stuff 10K, we demonstrated that BRD significantly surpasses the current methods without increasing the inference costs, generating crisp region boundaries and smooth connecting regions that are challenging for small models.

LLM-FP4: 4-Bit Floating-Point Quantized Transformers

We propose LLM-FP4 for quantizing both weights and activations in large language models (LLMs) down to 4-bit floating-point values, in a post-training manner. Existing post-training quantization (PTQ) solutions are primarily integer-based and struggle with bit widths below 8 bits. Compared to integer quantization, floating-point (FP) quantization is more flexible and can better handle long-tail or bell-shaped distributions, and it has emerged as a default choice in many hardware platforms. One characteristic of FP quantization is that its performance largely depends on the choice of exponent bits and clipping range. In this regard, we construct a strong FP-PTQ baseline by searching for the optimal quantization parameters. Furthermore, we observe a high inter-channel variance and low intra-channel variance pattern in activation distributions, which adds activation quantization difficulty. We recognize this pattern to be consistent across a spectrum of transformer models designed for diverse tasks, such as LLMs, BERT, and Vision Transformer models. To tackle this, we propose per-channel activation quantization and show that these additional scaling factors can be reparameterized as exponential biases of weights, incurring a negligible cost. Our method, for the first time, can quantize both weights and activations in the LLaMA-13B to only 4-bit and achieves an average score of 63.1 on the common sense zero-shot reasoning tasks, which is only 5.8 lower than the full-precision model, significantly outperforming the previous state-of-the-art by 12.7 points. Code is available at: https://github.com/nbasyl/LLM-FP4.