Beyond Background Shift: Rethinking Instance Replay in Continual Semantic Segmentation

In this work, we focus on continual semantic segmentation (CSS), where segmentation networks are required to continuously learn new classes without erasing knowledge of previously learned ones. Although storing images of old classes and directly incorporating them into the training of new models has proven effective in mitigating catastrophic forgetting in classification tasks, this strategy presents notable limitations in CSS. Specifically, the stored and new images with partial category annotations leads to confusion between unannotated categories and the background, complicating model fitting. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes a novel Enhanced Instance Replay (EIR) method, which not only preserves knowledge of old classes while simultaneously eliminating background confusion by instance storage of old classes, but also mitigates background shifts in the new images by integrating stored instances with new images. By effectively resolving background shifts in both stored and new images, EIR alleviates catastrophic forgetting in the CSS task, thereby enhancing the model's capacity for CSS. Experimental results validate the efficacy of our approach, which significantly outperforms state-of-the-art CSS methods.

Casual Inference via Style Bias Deconfounding for Domain Generalization

Deep neural networks (DNNs) often struggle with out-of-distribution data, limiting their reliability in diverse realworld applications. To address this issue, domain generalization methods have been developed to learn domain-invariant features from single or multiple training domains, enabling generalization to unseen testing domains. However, existing approaches usually overlook the impact of style frequency within the training set. This oversight predisposes models to capture spurious visual correlations caused by style confounding factors, rather than learning truly causal representations, thereby undermining inference reliability. In this work, we introduce Style Deconfounding Causal Learning (SDCL), a novel causal inference-based framework designed to explicitly address style as a confounding factor. Our approaches begins with constructing a structural causal model (SCM) tailored to the domain generalization problem and applies a backdoor adjustment strategy to account for style influence. Building on this foundation, we design a style-guided expert module (SGEM) to adaptively clusters style distributions during training, capturing the global confounding style. Additionally, a back-door causal learning module (BDCL) performs causal interventions during feature extraction, ensuring fair integration of global confounding styles into sample predictions, effectively reducing style bias. The SDCL framework is highly versatile and can be seamlessly integrated with state-of-the-art data augmentation techniques. Extensive experiments across diverse natural and medical image recognition tasks validate its efficacy, demonstrating superior performance in both multi-domain and the more challenging single-domain generalization scenarios.

GeoFlow-SLAM: A Robust Tightly-Coupled RGBD-Inertial Fusion SLAM for Dynamic Legged Robotics

This paper presents GeoFlow-SLAM, a robust and effective Tightly-Coupled RGBD-inertial SLAM for legged robots operating in highly dynamic environments.By integrating geometric consistency, legged odometry constraints, and dual-stream optical flow (GeoFlow), our method addresses three critical challenges:feature matching and pose initialization failures during fast locomotion and visual feature scarcity in texture-less scenes.Specifically, in rapid motion scenarios, feature matching is notably enhanced by leveraging dual-stream optical flow, which combines prior map points and poses. Additionally, we propose a robust pose initialization method for fast locomotion and IMU error in legged robots, integrating IMU/Legged odometry, inter-frame Perspective-n-Point (PnP), and Generalized Iterative Closest Point (GICP). Furthermore, a novel optimization framework that tightly couples depth-to-map and GICP geometric constraints is first introduced to improve the robustness and accuracy in long-duration, visually texture-less environments. The proposed algorithms achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) on collected legged robots and open-source datasets. To further promote research and development, the open-source datasets and code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/NSN-Hello/GeoFlow-SLAM

A Block Term Decomposition Model Based Algorithm for Tensor Completion of Multidimensional Harmonic Signals

We consider tensor data completion of an incomplete observation of multidimensional harmonic (MH) signals. Unlike existing tensor-based techniques for MH retrieval (MHR), which mostly adopt the canonical polyadic decomposition (CPD) to model the simple "one-to-one" correspondence among harmonics across difference modes, we herein use the more flexible block term decomposition (BTD) model that can be used to describe the complex mutual correspondences among several groups of harmonics across different modes. An optimization principle that aims to fit the BTD model in the least squares sense, subject to rank minimization of hankelized MH components, is set up for the tensor completion task, and an algorithm based on alternating direction method of multipliers is proposed, of which the effectiveness and applicability are validated through both numerical simulations and an application in Sub-6GHz channel state information (CSI) completion.

A parametric non-negative coupled canonical polyadic decomposition algorithm for hyperspectral super-resolution

Recently, coupled tensor decomposition has been widely used in data fusion of a hyperspectral image (HSI) and a multispectral image (MSI) for hyperspectral super-resolution (HSR). However, exsiting works often ignore the inherent non-negative (NN) property of the image data, or impose the NN constraint via hard-thresholding which may interfere with the optimization procedure and cause the method to be sub-optimal. As such, we propose a novel NN coupled canonical polyadic decomposition (NN-C-CPD) algorithm, which makes use of the parametric method and nonlinear least squares (NLS) framework to impose the NN constraint into the C-CPD computation. More exactly, the NN constraint is converted into the squared relationship between the NN entries of the factor matrices and a set of latent parameters. Based on the chain rule for deriving the derivatives, the key entities such as gradient and Jacobian with regards to the latent parameters can be derived, thus the NN constraint is naturally integrated without interfering with the optimization procedure. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed NN-C-CPD algorithm in HSR applications.

Investigating Numerical Translation with Large Language Models

The inaccurate translation of numbers can lead to significant security issues, ranging from financial setbacks to medical inaccuracies. While large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in machine translation, their capacity for translating numbers has not been thoroughly explored. This study focuses on evaluating the reliability of LLM-based machine translation systems when handling numerical data. In order to systematically test the numerical translation capabilities of currently open source LLMs, we have constructed a numerical translation dataset between Chinese and English based on real business data, encompassing ten types of numerical translation. Experiments on the dataset indicate that errors in numerical translation are a common issue, with most open-source LLMs faltering when faced with our test scenarios. Especially when it comes to numerical types involving large units like ``million", ``billion", and "yi", even the latest llama3.1 8b model can have error rates as high as 20%. Finally, we introduce three potential strategies to mitigate the numerical mistranslations for large units.

iLLaVA: An Image is Worth Fewer Than 1/3 Input Tokens in Large Multimodal Models

In this paper, we introduce iLLaVA, a simple method that can be seamlessly deployed upon current Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to greatly increase the throughput with nearly lossless model performance, without a further requirement to train. iLLaVA achieves this by finding and gradually merging the redundant tokens with an accurate and fast algorithm, which can merge hundreds of tokens within only one step. While some previous methods have explored directly pruning or merging tokens in the inference stage to accelerate models, our method excels in both performance and throughput by two key designs. First, while most previous methods only try to save the computations of Large Language Models (LLMs), our method accelerates the forward pass of both image encoders and LLMs in LVLMs, which both occupy a significant part of time during inference. Second, our method recycles the beneficial information from the pruned tokens into existing tokens, which avoids directly dropping context tokens like previous methods to cause performance loss. iLLaVA can nearly 2$\times$ the throughput, and reduce the memory costs by half with only a 0.2\% - 0.5\% performance drop across models of different scales including 7B, 13B and 34B. On tasks across different domains including single-image, multi-images and videos, iLLaVA demonstrates strong generalizability with consistently promising efficiency. We finally offer abundant visualizations to show the merging processes of iLLaVA in each step, which show insights into the distribution of computing resources in LVLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/hulianyuyy/iLLaVA.

GS-Matching: Reconsidering Feature Matching task in Point Cloud Registration

Traditional point cloud registration (PCR) methods for feature matching often employ the nearest neighbor policy. This leads to many-to-one matches and numerous potential inliers without any corresponding point. Recently, some approaches have framed the feature matching task as an assignment problem to achieve optimal one-to-one matches. We argue that the transition to the Assignment problem is not reliable for general correspondence-based PCR. In this paper, we propose a heuristics stable matching policy called GS-matching, inspired by the Gale-Shapley algorithm. Compared to the other matching policies, our method can perform efficiently and find more non-repetitive inliers under low overlapping conditions. Furthermore, we employ the probability theory to analyze the feature matching task, providing new insights into this research problem. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our matching policy, achieving better registration recall on multiple datasets.

VERIFIED: A Video Corpus Moment Retrieval Benchmark for Fine-Grained Video Understanding

Existing Video Corpus Moment Retrieval (VCMR) is limited to coarse-grained understanding, which hinders precise video moment localization when given fine-grained queries. In this paper, we propose a more challenging fine-grained VCMR benchmark requiring methods to localize the best-matched moment from the corpus with other partially matched candidates. To improve the dataset construction efficiency and guarantee high-quality data annotations, we propose VERIFIED, an automatic \underline{V}id\underline{E}o-text annotation pipeline to generate captions with \underline{R}el\underline{I}able \underline{FI}n\underline{E}-grained statics and \underline{D}ynamics. Specifically, we resort to large language models (LLM) and large multimodal models (LMM) with our proposed Statics and Dynamics Enhanced Captioning modules to generate diverse fine-grained captions for each video. To filter out the inaccurate annotations caused by the LLM hallucination, we propose a Fine-Granularity Aware Noise Evaluator where we fine-tune a video foundation model with disturbed hard-negatives augmented contrastive and matching losses. With VERIFIED, we construct a more challenging fine-grained VCMR benchmark containing Charades-FIG, DiDeMo-FIG, and ActivityNet-FIG which demonstrate a high level of annotation quality. We evaluate several state-of-the-art VCMR models on the proposed dataset, revealing that there is still significant scope for fine-grained video understanding in VCMR. Code and Datasets are in \href{https://github.com/hlchen23/VERIFIED}{https://github.com/hlchen23/VERIFIED}.

VOVTrack: Exploring the Potentiality in Videos for Open-Vocabulary Object Tracking

Open-vocabulary multi-object tracking (OVMOT) represents a critical new challenge involving the detection and tracking of diverse object categories in videos, encompassing both seen categories (base classes) and unseen categories (novel classes). This issue amalgamates the complexities of open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) and multi-object tracking (MOT). Existing approaches to OVMOT often merge OVD and MOT methodologies as separate modules, predominantly focusing on the problem through an image-centric lens. In this paper, we propose VOVTrack, a novel method that integrates object states relevant to MOT and video-centric training to address this challenge from a video object tracking standpoint. First, we consider the tracking-related state of the objects during tracking and propose a new prompt-guided attention mechanism for more accurate localization and classification (detection) of the time-varying objects. Subsequently, we leverage raw video data without annotations for training by formulating a self-supervised object similarity learning technique to facilitate temporal object association (tracking). Experimental results underscore that VOVTrack outperforms existing methods, establishing itself as a state-of-the-art solution for open-vocabulary tracking task.