MERaLiON-AudioLLM: Technical Report

We introduce MERaLiON-AudioLLM (Multimodal Empathetic Reasoning and Learning in One Network), the first speech-text model tailored for Singapore's multilingual and multicultural landscape. Developed under the National Large Language Models Funding Initiative, Singapore, MERaLiON-AudioLLM integrates advanced speech and text processing to address the diverse linguistic nuances of local accents and dialects, enhancing accessibility and usability in complex, multilingual environments. Our results demonstrate improvements in both speech recognition and task-specific understanding, positioning MERaLiON-AudioLLM as a pioneering solution for region specific AI applications. We envision this release to set a precedent for future models designed to address localised linguistic and cultural contexts in a global framework.

RMP-YOLO: A Robust Motion Predictor for Partially Observable Scenarios even if You Only Look Once

We introduce RMP-YOLO, a unified framework designed to provide robust motion predictions even with incomplete input data. Our key insight stems from the observation that complete and reliable historical trajectory data plays a pivotal role in ensuring accurate motion prediction. Therefore, we propose a new paradigm that prioritizes the reconstruction of intact historical trajectories before feeding them into the prediction modules. Our approach introduces a novel scene tokenization module to enhance the extraction and fusion of spatial and temporal features. Following this, our proposed recovery module reconstructs agents' incomplete historical trajectories by leveraging local map topology and interactions with nearby agents. The reconstructed, clean historical data is then integrated into the downstream prediction modules. Our framework is able to effectively handle missing data of varying lengths and remains robust against observation noise, while maintaining high prediction accuracy. Furthermore, our recovery module is compatible with existing prediction models, ensuring seamless integration. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, and deployment in real-world autonomous vehicles confirms its practical utility. In the 2024 Waymo Motion Prediction Competition, our method, RMP-YOLO, achieves state-of-the-art performance, securing third place.

MoWE-Audio: Multitask AudioLLMs with Mixture of Weak Encoders

The rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced natural language processing capabilities, facilitating the development of AudioLLMs that process and understand speech and audio inputs alongside text. Existing AudioLLMs typically combine a pre-trained audio encoder with a pre-trained LLM, which are subsequently finetuned on specific audio tasks. However, the pre-trained audio encoder has constrained capacity to capture features for new tasks and datasets. To address this, we propose to incorporate mixtures of `weak' encoders (MoWE) into the AudioLLM framework. MoWE supplements a base encoder with a pool of relatively light weight encoders, selectively activated based on the audio input to enhance feature extraction without significantly increasing model size. Our empirical results demonstrate that MoWE effectively improves multi-task performance, broadening the applicability of AudioLLMs to more diverse audio tasks.

DRAMA: An Efficient End-to-end Motion Planner for Autonomous Driving with Mamba

Motion planning is a challenging task to generate safe and feasible trajectories in highly dynamic and complex environments, forming a core capability for autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we propose DRAMA, the first Mamba-based end-to-end motion planner for autonomous vehicles. DRAMA fuses camera, LiDAR Bird's Eye View images in the feature space, as well as ego status information, to generate a series of future ego trajectories. Unlike traditional transformer-based methods with quadratic attention complexity for sequence length, DRAMA is able to achieve a less computationally intensive attention complexity, demonstrating potential to deal with increasingly complex scenarios. Leveraging our Mamba fusion module, DRAMA efficiently and effectively fuses the features of the camera and LiDAR modalities. In addition, we introduce a Mamba-Transformer decoder that enhances the overall planning performance. This module is universally adaptable to any Transformer-based model, especially for tasks with long sequence inputs. We further introduce a novel feature state dropout which improves the planner's robustness without increasing training and inference times. Extensive experimental results show that DRAMA achieves higher accuracy on the NAVSIM dataset compared to the baseline Transfuser, with fewer parameters and lower computational costs.

Table-Filling via Mean Teacher for Cross-domain Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

Cross-domain Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to extract fine-grained sentiment elements from target domain sentences by leveraging the knowledge acquired from the source domain. Due to the absence of labeled data in the target domain, recent studies tend to rely on pre-trained language models to generate large amounts of synthetic data for training purposes. However, these approaches entail additional computational costs associated with the generation process. Different from them, we discover a striking resemblance between table-filling methods in ASTE and two-stage Object Detection (OD) in computer vision, which inspires us to revisit the cross-domain ASTE task and approach it from an OD standpoint. This allows the model to benefit from the OD extraction paradigm and region-level alignment. Building upon this premise, we propose a novel method named \textbf{T}able-\textbf{F}illing via \textbf{M}ean \textbf{T}eacher (TFMT). Specifically, the table-filling methods encode the sentence into a 2D table to detect word relations, while TFMT treats the table as a feature map and utilizes a region consistency to enhance the quality of those generated pseudo labels. Additionally, considering the existence of the domain gap, a cross-domain consistency based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy is designed to alleviate domain shift problems. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with minimal parameters and computational costs, making it a strong baseline for cross-domain ASTE.

AudioBench: A Universal Benchmark for Audio Large Language Models

We introduce AudioBench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate audio large language models (AudioLLMs). AudioBench encompasses 8 distinct tasks and 26 carefully selected or newly curated datasets, focusing on speech understanding, voice interpretation, and audio scene understanding. Despite the rapid advancement of large language models, including multimodal versions, a significant gap exists in comprehensive benchmarks for thoroughly evaluating their capabilities. AudioBench addresses this gap by providing relevant datasets and evaluation metrics. In our study, we evaluated the capabilities of four models across various aspects and found that no single model excels consistently across all tasks. We outline the research outlook for AudioLLMs and anticipate that our open-source code, data, and leaderboard will offer a robust testbed for future model developments.

SEACrowd: A Multilingual Multimodal Data Hub and Benchmark Suite for Southeast Asian Languages

Southeast Asia (SEA) is a region rich in linguistic diversity and cultural variety, with over 1,300 indigenous languages and a population of 671 million people. However, prevailing AI models suffer from a significant lack of representation of texts, images, and audio datasets from SEA, compromising the quality of AI models for SEA languages. Evaluating models for SEA languages is challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality datasets, compounded by the dominance of English training data, raising concerns about potential cultural misrepresentation. To address these challenges, we introduce SEACrowd, a collaborative initiative that consolidates a comprehensive resource hub that fills the resource gap by providing standardized corpora in nearly 1,000 SEA languages across three modalities. Through our SEACrowd benchmarks, we assess the quality of AI models on 36 indigenous languages across 13 tasks, offering valuable insights into the current AI landscape in SEA. Furthermore, we propose strategies to facilitate greater AI advancements, maximizing potential utility and resource equity for the future of AI in SEA.

ADM: Accelerated Diffusion Model via Estimated Priors for Robust Motion Prediction under Uncertainties

Motion prediction is a challenging problem in autonomous driving as it demands the system to comprehend stochastic dynamics and the multi-modal nature of real-world agent interactions. Diffusion models have recently risen to prominence, and have proven particularly effective in pedestrian motion prediction tasks. However, the significant time consumption and sensitivity to noise have limited the real-time predictive capability of diffusion models. In response to these impediments, we propose a novel diffusion-based, acceleratable framework that adeptly predicts future trajectories of agents with enhanced resistance to noise. The core idea of our model is to learn a coarse-grained prior distribution of trajectory, which can skip a large number of denoise steps. This advancement not only boosts sampling efficiency but also maintains the fidelity of prediction accuracy. Our method meets the rigorous real-time operational standards essential for autonomous vehicles, enabling prompt trajectory generation that is vital for secure and efficient navigation. Through extensive experiments, our method speeds up the inference time to 136ms compared to standard diffusion model, and achieves significant improvement in multi-agent motion prediction on the Argoverse 1 motion forecasting dataset.

ControlMTR: Control-Guided Motion Transformer with Scene-Compliant Intention Points for Feasible Motion Prediction

The ability to accurately predict feasible multimodal future trajectories of surrounding traffic participants is crucial for behavior planning in autonomous vehicles. The Motion Transformer (MTR), a state-of-the-art motion prediction method, alleviated mode collapse and instability during training and enhanced overall prediction performance by replacing conventional dense future endpoints with a small set of fixed prior motion intention points. However, the fixed prior intention points make the MTR multi-modal prediction distribution over-scattered and infeasible in many scenarios. In this paper, we propose the ControlMTR framework to tackle the aforementioned issues by generating scene-compliant intention points and additionally predicting driving control commands, which are then converted into trajectories by a simple kinematic model with soft constraints. These control-generated trajectories will guide the directly predicted trajectories by an auxiliary loss function. Together with our proposed scene-compliant intention points, they can effectively restrict the prediction distribution within the road boundaries and suppress infeasible off-road predictions while enhancing prediction performance. Remarkably, without resorting to additional model ensemble techniques, our method surpasses the baseline MTR model across all performance metrics, achieving notable improvements of 5.22% in SoftmAP and a 4.15% reduction in MissRate. Our approach notably results in a 41.85% reduction in the cross-boundary rate of the MTR, effectively ensuring that the prediction distribution is confined within the drivable area.

High-Fidelity SLAM Using Gaussian Splatting with Rendering-Guided Densification and Regularized Optimization

We propose a dense RGBD SLAM system based on 3D Gaussian Splatting that provides metrically accurate pose tracking and visually realistic reconstruction. To this end, we first propose a Gaussian densification strategy based on the rendering loss to map unobserved areas and refine reobserved areas. Second, we introduce extra regularization parameters to alleviate the forgetting problem in the continuous mapping problem, where parameters tend to overfit the latest frame and result in decreasing rendering quality for previous frames. Both mapping and tracking are performed with Gaussian parameters by minimizing re-rendering loss in a differentiable way. Compared to recent neural and concurrently developed gaussian splatting RGBD SLAM baselines, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on the synthetic dataset Replica and competitive results on the real-world dataset TUM.