PSCon: Toward Conversational Product Search

Conversational Product Search (CPS) is confined to simulated conversations due to the lack of real-world CPS datasets that reflect human-like language. Additionally, current conversational datasets are limited to support cross-market and multi-lingual usage. In this paper, we introduce a new CPS data collection protocol and present PSCon, a novel CPS dataset designed to assist product search via human-like conversations. The dataset is constructed using a coached human-to-human data collection protocol and supports two languages and dual markets. Also, the dataset enables thorough exploration of six subtasks of CPS: user intent detection, keyword extraction, system action prediction, question selection, item ranking, and response generation. Furthermore, we also offer an analysis of the dataset and propose a benchmark model on the proposed CPS dataset.

Spiking Vision Transformer with Saccadic Attention

The combination of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs) holds potential for achieving both energy efficiency and high performance, particularly suitable for edge vision applications. However, a significant performance gap still exists between SNN-based ViTs and their ANN counterparts. Here, we first analyze why SNN-based ViTs suffer from limited performance and identify a mismatch between the vanilla self-attention mechanism and spatio-temporal spike trains. This mismatch results in degraded spatial relevance and limited temporal interactions. To address these issues, we draw inspiration from biological saccadic attention mechanisms and introduce an innovative Saccadic Spike Self-Attention (SSSA) method. Specifically, in the spatial domain, SSSA employs a novel spike distribution-based method to effectively assess the relevance between Query and Key pairs in SNN-based ViTs. Temporally, SSSA employs a saccadic interaction module that dynamically focuses on selected visual areas at each timestep and significantly enhances whole scene understanding through temporal interactions. Building on the SSSA mechanism, we develop a SNN-based Vision Transformer (SNN-ViT). Extensive experiments across various visual tasks demonstrate that SNN-ViT achieves state-of-the-art performance with linear computational complexity. The effectiveness and efficiency of the SNN-ViT highlight its potential for power-critical edge vision applications.

MSE-Adapter: A Lightweight Plugin Endowing LLMs with the Capability to Perform Multimodal Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Recognition

Current Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) and Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) methods based on pre-trained language models exhibit two primary limitations: 1) Once trained for MSA and ERC tasks, these pre-trained language models lose their original generalized capabilities. 2) They demand considerable computational resources. As the size of pre-trained language models continues to grow, training larger multimodal sentiment analysis models using previous approaches could result in unnecessary computational cost. In response to this challenge, we propose \textbf{M}ultimodal \textbf{S}entiment Analysis and \textbf{E}motion Recognition \textbf{Adapter} (MSE-Adapter), a lightweight and adaptable plugin. This plugin enables a large language model (LLM) to carry out MSA or ERC tasks with minimal computational overhead (only introduces approximately 2.6M to 2.8M trainable parameters upon the 6/7B models), while preserving the intrinsic capabilities of the LLM. In the MSE-Adapter, the Text-Guide-Mixer (TGM) module is introduced to establish explicit connections between non-textual and textual modalities through the Hadamard product. This allows non-textual modalities to better align with textual modalities at the feature level, promoting the generation of higher-quality pseudo tokens. Extensive experiments were conducted on four public English and Chinese datasets using consumer-grade GPUs and open-source LLMs (Qwen-1.8B, ChatGLM3-6B-base, and LLaMA2-7B) as the backbone. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed plugin. The code will be released on GitHub after a blind review.

QP-SNN: Quantized and Pruned Spiking Neural Networks

Brain-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) leverage sparse spikes to encode information and operate in an asynchronous event-driven manner, offering a highly energy-efficient paradigm for machine intelligence. However, the current SNN community focuses primarily on performance improvement by developing large-scale models, which limits the applicability of SNNs in resource-limited edge devices. In this paper, we propose a hardware-friendly and lightweight SNN, aimed at effectively deploying high-performance SNN in resource-limited scenarios. Specifically, we first develop a baseline model that integrates uniform quantization and structured pruning, called QP-SNN baseline. While this baseline significantly reduces storage demands and computational costs, it suffers from performance decline. To address this, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the challenges in quantization and pruning that lead to performance degradation and propose solutions to enhance the baseline's performance. For weight quantization, we propose a weight rescaling strategy that utilizes bit width more effectively to enhance the model's representation capability. For structured pruning, we propose a novel pruning criterion using the singular value of spatiotemporal spike activities to enable more accurate removal of redundant kernels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that integrating two proposed methods into the baseline allows QP-SNN to achieve state-of-the-art performance and efficiency, underscoring its potential for enhancing SNN deployment in edge intelligence computing.

Multi-Label Test-Time Adaptation with Bound Entropy Minimization

Mainstream test-time adaptation (TTA) techniques endeavor to mitigate distribution shifts via entropy minimization for multi-class classification, inherently increasing the probability of the most confident class. However, when encountering multi-label instances, the primary challenge stems from the varying number of labels per image, and prioritizing only the highest probability class inevitably undermines the adaptation of other positive labels. To address this issue, we investigate TTA within multi-label scenario (ML--TTA), developing Bound Entropy Minimization (BEM) objective to simultaneously increase the confidence of multiple top predicted labels. Specifically, to determine the number of labels for each augmented view, we retrieve a paired caption with yielded textual labels for that view. These labels are allocated to both the view and caption, called weak label set and strong label set with the same size k. Following this, the proposed BEM considers the highest top-k predicted labels from view and caption as a single entity, respectively, learning both view and caption prompts concurrently. By binding top-k predicted labels, BEM overcomes the limitation of vanilla entropy minimization, which exclusively optimizes the most confident class. Across the MSCOCO, VOC, and NUSWIDE multi-label datasets, our ML--TTA framework equipped with BEM exhibits superior performance compared to the latest SOTA methods, across various model architectures, prompt initialization, and varying label scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/Jinx630/ML-TTA.

3rd Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2025: Challenge Results

The 3rd Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2025 addresses maritime computer vision for Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV) and underwater. This report offers a comprehensive overview of the findings from the challenges. We provide both statistical and qualitative analyses, evaluating trends from over 700 submissions. All datasets, evaluation code, and the leaderboard are available to the public at https://macvi.org/workshop/macvi25.

BRIGHT-VO: Brightness-Guided Hybrid Transformer for Visual Odometry with Multi-modality Refinement Module

Visual odometry (VO) plays a crucial role in autonomous driving, robotic navigation, and other related tasks by estimating the position and orientation of a camera based on visual input. Significant progress has been made in data-driven VO methods, particularly those leveraging deep learning techniques to extract image features and estimate camera poses. However, these methods often struggle in low-light conditions because of the reduced visibility of features and the increased difficulty of matching keypoints. To address this limitation, we introduce BrightVO, a novel VO model based on Transformer architecture, which not only performs front-end visual feature extraction, but also incorporates a multi-modality refinement module in the back-end that integrates Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data. Using pose graph optimization, this module iteratively refines pose estimates to reduce errors and improve both accuracy and robustness. Furthermore, we create a synthetic low-light dataset, KiC4R, which includes a variety of lighting conditions to facilitate the training and evaluation of VO frameworks in challenging environments. Experimental results demonstrate that BrightVO achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the KiC4R dataset and the KITTI benchmarks. Specifically, it provides an average improvement of 20% in pose estimation accuracy in normal outdoor environments and 259% in low-light conditions, outperforming existing methods. For widespread use and further development, the research work is fully open-source at https://github.com/Anastasiawd/BrightVO.

CoreNet: Conflict Resolution Network for Point-Pixel Misalignment and Sub-Task Suppression of 3D LiDAR-Camera Object Detection

Fusing multi-modality inputs from different sensors is an effective way to improve the performance of 3D object detection. However, current methods overlook two important conflicts: point-pixel misalignment and sub-task suppression. The former means a pixel feature from the opaque object is projected to multiple point features of the same ray in the world space, and the latter means the classification prediction and bounding box regression may cause mutual suppression. In this paper, we propose a novel method named Conflict Resolution Network (CoreNet) to address the aforementioned issues. Specifically, we first propose a dual-stream transformation module to tackle point-pixel misalignment. It consists of ray-based and point-based 2D-to-BEV transformations. Both of them achieve approximately unique mapping from the image space to the world space. Moreover, we introduce a task-specific predictor to tackle sub-task suppression. It uses the dual-branch structure which adopts class-specific query and Bbox-specific query to corresponding sub-tasks. Each task-specific query is constructed of task-specific feature and general feature, which allows the heads to adaptively select information of interest based on different sub-tasks. Experiments on the large-scale nuScenes dataset demonstrate the superiority of our proposed CoreNet, by achieving 75.6\% NDS and 73.3\% mAP on the nuScenes test set without test-time augmentation and model ensemble techniques. The ample ablation study also demonstrates the effectiveness of each component. The code is released on https://github.com/liyih/CoreNet.

Binary Event-Driven Spiking Transformer

Transformer-based Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) introduce a novel event-driven self-attention paradigm that combines the high performance of Transformers with the energy efficiency of SNNs. However, the larger model size and increased computational demands of the Transformer structure limit their practicality in resource-constrained scenarios. In this paper, we integrate binarization techniques into Transformer-based SNNs and propose the Binary Event-Driven Spiking Transformer, i.e. BESTformer. The proposed BESTformer can significantly reduce storage and computational demands by representing weights and attention maps with a mere 1-bit. However, BESTformer suffers from a severe performance drop from its full-precision counterpart due to the limited representation capability of binarization. To address this issue, we propose a Coupled Information Enhancement (CIE) method, which consists of a reversible framework and information enhancement distillation. By maximizing the mutual information between the binary model and its full-precision counterpart, the CIE method effectively mitigates the performance degradation of the BESTformer. Extensive experiments on static and neuromorphic datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance to other binary SNNs, showcasing its potential as a compact yet high-performance model for resource-limited edge devices.

Separate Source Channel Coding Is Still What You Need: An LLM-based Rethinking

Along with the proliferating research interest in Semantic Communication (SemCom), Joint Source Channel Coding (JSCC) has dominated the attention due to the widely assumed existence in efficiently delivering information semantics. %has emerged as a pivotal area of research, aiming to enhance the efficiency and reliability of information transmission through deep learning-based methods. Nevertheless, this paper challenges the conventional JSCC paradigm, and advocates for adoption of Separate Source Channel Coding (SSCC) to enjoy the underlying more degree of freedom for optimization. We demonstrate that SSCC, after leveraging the strengths of Large Language Model (LLM) for source coding and Error Correction Code Transformer (ECCT) complemented for channel decoding, offers superior performance over JSCC. Our proposed framework also effectively highlights the compatibility challenges between SemCom approaches and digital communication systems, particularly concerning the resource costs associated with the transmission of high precision floating point numbers. Through comprehensive evaluations, we establish that empowered by LLM-based compression and ECCT-enhanced error correction, SSCC remains a viable and effective solution for modern communication systems. In other words, separate source and channel coding is still what we need!