EfficientLLaVA:Generalizable Auto-Pruning for Large Vision-language Models

While multimodal large language models demonstrate strong performance in complex reasoning tasks, they pose significant challenges related to model complexity during deployment, especially for resource-limited devices. In this paper, we propose an automatic pruning method for large vision-language models to enhance the efficiency of multimodal reasoning. Conventional methods rely on the training data of the original model to select the proper pruning ratio for different network components. However, these methods are impractical for large vision-language models due to the unaffordable search costs caused by web-scale training corpus. In contrast, our approach only leverages a small number of samples to search for the desired pruning policy by maximizing its generalization ability on unknown training data while maintaining the model accuracy, which enables the achievement of an optimal trade-off between accuracy and efficiency for large visual language models. Specifically, we formulate the generalization gap of the pruning strategy using the structural risk minimization principle. Based on both task performance and generalization capability, we iteratively search for the optimal pruning policy within a given search space and optimize the vision projector to evolve the search space with higher upper bound of performance. We conduct extensive experiments on the ScienceQA, Vizwiz, MM-vet, and LLaVA-Bench datasets for the task of visual question answering. Using only 64 samples for pruning policy search, EfficientLLaVA achieves an accuracy of 83.05% on ScienceQA, along with a $\times$ 1.8 speedup compared to the dense LLaVA-v1.5-7B model.

MoManipVLA: Transferring Vision-language-action Models for General Mobile Manipulation

Mobile manipulation is the fundamental challenge for robotics to assist humans with diverse tasks and environments in everyday life. However, conventional mobile manipulation approaches often struggle to generalize across different tasks and environments because of the lack of large-scale training. In contrast, recent advances in vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown impressive generalization capabilities, but these foundation models are developed for fixed-base manipulation tasks. Therefore, we propose an efficient policy adaptation framework named MoManipVLA to transfer pre-trained VLA models of fix-base manipulation to mobile manipulation, so that high generalization ability across tasks and environments can be achieved in mobile manipulation policy. Specifically, we utilize pre-trained VLA models to generate waypoints of the end-effector with high generalization ability. We design motion planning objectives for the mobile base and the robot arm, which aim at maximizing the physical feasibility of the trajectory. Finally, we present an efficient bi-level objective optimization framework for trajectory generation, where the upper-level optimization predicts waypoints for base movement to enhance the manipulator policy space, and the lower-level optimization selects the optimal end-effector trajectory to complete the manipulation task. In this way, MoManipVLA can adjust the position of the robot base in a zero-shot manner, thus making the waypoints predicted from the fixed-base VLA models feasible. Extensive experimental results on OVMM and the real world demonstrate that MoManipVLA achieves a 4.2% higher success rate than the state-of-the-art mobile manipulation, and only requires 50 training cost for real world deployment due to the strong generalization ability in the pre-trained VLA models.

UniGoal: Towards Universal Zero-shot Goal-oriented Navigation

In this paper, we propose a general framework for universal zero-shot goal-oriented navigation. Existing zero-shot methods build inference framework upon large language models (LLM) for specific tasks, which differs a lot in overall pipeline and fails to generalize across different types of goal. Towards the aim of universal zero-shot navigation, we propose a uniform graph representation to unify different goals, including object category, instance image and text description. We also convert the observation of agent into an online maintained scene graph. With this consistent scene and goal representation, we preserve most structural information compared with pure text and are able to leverage LLM for explicit graph-based reasoning. Specifically, we conduct graph matching between the scene graph and goal graph at each time instant and propose different strategies to generate long-term goal of exploration according to different matching states. The agent first iteratively searches subgraph of goal when zero-matched. With partial matching, the agent then utilizes coordinate projection and anchor pair alignment to infer the goal location. Finally scene graph correction and goal verification are applied for perfect matching. We also present a blacklist mechanism to enable robust switch between stages. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks show that our UniGoal achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on three studied navigation tasks with a single model, even outperforming task-specific zero-shot methods and supervised universal methods.

Q-VLM: Post-training Quantization for Large Vision-Language Models

In this paper, we propose a post-training quantization framework of large vision-language models (LVLMs) for efficient multi-modal inference. Conventional quantization methods sequentially search the layer-wise rounding functions by minimizing activation discretization errors, which fails to acquire optimal quantization strategy without considering cross-layer dependency. On the contrary, we mine the cross-layer dependency that significantly influences discretization errors of the entire vision-language model, and embed this dependency into optimal quantization strategy searching with low search cost. Specifically, we observe the strong correlation between the activation entropy and the cross-layer dependency concerning output discretization errors. Therefore, we employ the entropy as the proxy to partition blocks optimally, which aims to achieve satisfying trade-offs between discretization errors and the search cost. Moreover, we optimize the visual encoder to disentangle the cross-layer dependency for fine-grained decomposition of search space, so that the search cost is further reduced without harming the quantization accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that our method compresses the memory by 2.78x and increase generate speed by 1.44x about 13B LLaVA model without performance degradation on diverse multi-modal reasoning tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/ChangyuanWang17/QVLM.

SG-Nav: Online 3D Scene Graph Prompting for LLM-based Zero-shot Object Navigation

In this paper, we propose a new framework for zero-shot object navigation. Existing zero-shot object navigation methods prompt LLM with the text of spatially closed objects, which lacks enough scene context for in-depth reasoning. To better preserve the information of environment and fully exploit the reasoning ability of LLM, we propose to represent the observed scene with 3D scene graph. The scene graph encodes the relationships between objects, groups and rooms with a LLM-friendly structure, for which we design a hierarchical chain-of-thought prompt to help LLM reason the goal location according to scene context by traversing the nodes and edges. Moreover, benefit from the scene graph representation, we further design a re-perception mechanism to empower the object navigation framework with the ability to correct perception error. We conduct extensive experiments on MP3D, HM3D and RoboTHOR environments, where SG-Nav surpasses previous state-of-the-art zero-shot methods by more than 10% SR on all benchmarks, while the decision process is explainable. To the best of our knowledge, SG-Nav is the first zero-shot method that achieves even higher performance than supervised object navigation methods on the challenging MP3D benchmark.

EmbodiedSAM: Online Segment Any 3D Thing in Real Time

Embodied tasks require the agent to fully understand 3D scenes simultaneously with its exploration, so an online, real-time, fine-grained and highly-generalized 3D perception model is desperately needed. Since high-quality 3D data is limited, directly training such a model in 3D is almost infeasible. Meanwhile, vision foundation models (VFM) has revolutionized the field of 2D computer vision with superior performance, which makes the use of VFM to assist embodied 3D perception a promising direction. However, most existing VFM-assisted 3D perception methods are either offline or too slow that cannot be applied in practical embodied tasks. In this paper, we aim to leverage Segment Anything Model (SAM) for real-time 3D instance segmentation in an online setting. This is a challenging problem since future frames are not available in the input streaming RGB-D video, and an instance may be observed in several frames so object matching between frames is required. To address these challenges, we first propose a geometric-aware query lifting module to represent the 2D masks generated by SAM by 3D-aware queries, which is then iteratively refined by a dual-level query decoder. In this way, the 2D masks are transferred to fine-grained shapes on 3D point clouds. Benefit from the query representation for 3D masks, we can compute the similarity matrix between the 3D masks from different views by efficient matrix operation, which enables real-time inference. Experiments on ScanNet, ScanNet200, SceneNN and 3RScan show our method achieves leading performance even compared with offline methods. Our method also demonstrates great generalization ability in several zero-shot dataset transferring experiments and show great potential in open-vocabulary and data-efficient setting. Code and demo are available at https://xuxw98.github.io/ESAM/, with only one RTX 3090 GPU required for training and evaluation.

Embodied Instruction Following in Unknown Environments

Enabling embodied agents to complete complex human instructions from natural language is crucial to autonomous systems in household services. Conventional methods can only accomplish human instructions in the known environment where all interactive objects are provided to the embodied agent, and directly deploying the existing approaches for the unknown environment usually generates infeasible plans that manipulate non-existing objects. On the contrary, we propose an embodied instruction following (EIF) method for complex tasks in the unknown environment, where the agent efficiently explores the unknown environment to generate feasible plans with existing objects to accomplish abstract instructions. Specifically, we build a hierarchical embodied instruction following framework including the high-level task planner and the low-level exploration controller with multimodal large language models. We then construct a semantic representation map of the scene with dynamic region attention to demonstrate the known visual clues, where the goal of task planning and scene exploration is aligned for human instruction. For the task planner, we generate the feasible step-by-step plans for human goal accomplishment according to the task completion process and the known visual clues. For the exploration controller, the optimal navigation or object interaction policy is predicted based on the generated step-wise plans and the known visual clues. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve 45.09% success rate in 204 complex human instructions such as making breakfast and tidying rooms in large house-level scenes.

Memory-based Adapters for Online 3D Scene Perception

In this paper, we propose a new framework for online 3D scene perception. Conventional 3D scene perception methods are offline, i.e., take an already reconstructed 3D scene geometry as input, which is not applicable in robotic applications where the input data is streaming RGB-D videos rather than a complete 3D scene reconstructed from pre-collected RGB-D videos. To deal with online 3D scene perception tasks where data collection and perception should be performed simultaneously, the model should be able to process 3D scenes frame by frame and make use of the temporal information. To this end, we propose an adapter-based plug-and-play module for the backbone of 3D scene perception model, which constructs memory to cache and aggregate the extracted RGB-D features to empower offline models with temporal learning ability. Specifically, we propose a queued memory mechanism to cache the supporting point cloud and image features. Then we devise aggregation modules which directly perform on the memory and pass temporal information to current frame. We further propose 3D-to-2D adapter to enhance image features with strong global context. Our adapters can be easily inserted into mainstream offline architectures of different tasks and significantly boost their performance on online tasks. Extensive experiments on ScanNet and SceneNN datasets demonstrate our approach achieves leading performance on three 3D scene perception tasks compared with state-of-the-art online methods by simply finetuning existing offline models, without any model and task-specific designs. \href{https://xuxw98.github.io/Online3D/}{Project page}.

MCUFormer: Deploying Vision Tranformers on Microcontrollers with Limited Memory

Due to the high price and heavy energy consumption of GPUs, deploying deep models on IoT devices such as microcontrollers makes significant contributions for ecological AI. Conventional methods successfully enable convolutional neural network inference of high resolution images on microcontrollers, while the framework for vision transformers that achieve the state-of-the-art performance in many vision applications still remains unexplored. In this paper, we propose a hardware-algorithm co-optimizations method called MCUFormer to deploy vision transformers on microcontrollers with extremely limited memory, where we jointly design transformer architecture and construct the inference operator library to fit the memory resource constraint. More specifically, we generalize the one-shot network architecture search (NAS) to discover the optimal architecture with highest task performance given the memory budget from the microcontrollers, where we enlarge the existing search space of vision transformers by considering the low-rank decomposition dimensions and patch resolution for memory reduction. For the construction of the inference operator library of vision transformers, we schedule the memory buffer during inference through operator integration, patch embedding decomposition, and token overwriting, allowing the memory buffer to be fully utilized to adapt to the forward pass of the vision transformer. Experimental results demonstrate that our MCUFormer achieves 73.62\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet for image classification with 320KB memory on STM32F746 microcontroller. Code is available at https://github.com/liangyn22/MCUFormer.

Anyview: Generalizable Indoor 3D Object Detection with Variable Frames

In this paper, we propose a novel network framework for indoor 3D object detection to handle variable input frame numbers in practical scenarios. Existing methods only consider fixed frames of input data for a single detector, such as monocular RGB-D images or point clouds reconstructed from dense multi-view RGB-D images. While in practical application scenes such as robot navigation and manipulation, the raw input to the 3D detectors is the RGB-D images with variable frame numbers instead of the reconstructed scene point cloud. However, the previous approaches can only handle fixed frame input data and have poor performance with variable frame input. In order to facilitate 3D object detection methods suitable for practical tasks, we present a novel 3D detection framework named AnyView for our practical applications, which generalizes well across different numbers of input frames with a single model. To be specific, we propose a geometric learner to mine the local geometric features of each input RGB-D image frame and implement local-global feature interaction through a designed spatial mixture module. Meanwhile, we further utilize a dynamic token strategy to adaptively adjust the number of extracted features for each frame, which ensures consistent global feature density and further enhances the generalization after fusion. Extensive experiments on the ScanNet dataset show our method achieves both great generalizability and high detection accuracy with a simple and clean architecture containing a similar amount of parameters with the baselines.