Dynamic Ensemble Reasoning for LLM Experts

Ensemble reasoning for the strengths of different LLM experts is critical to achieving consistent and satisfactory performance on diverse inputs across a wide range of tasks. However, existing LLM ensemble methods are either computationally intensive or incapable of leveraging complementary knowledge among LLM experts for various inputs. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Ensemble Reasoning paradigm, called DER to integrate the strengths of multiple LLM experts conditioned on dynamic inputs. Specifically, we model the LLM ensemble reasoning problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), wherein an agent sequentially takes inputs to request knowledge from an LLM candidate and passes the output to a subsequent LLM candidate. Moreover, we devise a reward function to train a DER-Agent to dynamically select an optimal answering route given the input questions, aiming to achieve the highest performance with as few computational resources as possible. Last, to fully transfer the expert knowledge from the prior LLMs, we develop a Knowledge Transfer Prompt (KTP) that enables the subsequent LLM candidates to transfer complementary knowledge effectively. Experiments demonstrate that our method uses fewer computational resources to achieve better performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

DCF-DS: Deep Cascade Fusion of Diarization and Separation for Speech Recognition under Realistic Single-Channel Conditions

We propose a single-channel Deep Cascade Fusion of Diarization and Separation (DCF-DS) framework for back-end speech recognition, combining neural speaker diarization (NSD) and speech separation (SS). First, we sequentially integrate the NSD and SS modules within a joint training framework, enabling the separation module to leverage speaker time boundaries from the diarization module effectively. Then, to complement DCF-DS training, we introduce a window-level decoding scheme that allows the DCF-DS framework to handle the sparse data convergence instability (SDCI) problem. We also explore using an NSD system trained on real datasets to provide more accurate speaker boundaries during decoding. Additionally, we incorporate an optional multi-input multi-output speech enhancement module (MIMO-SE) within the DCF-DS framework, which offers further performance gains. Finally, we enhance diarization results by re-clustering DCF-DS outputs, improving ASR accuracy. By incorporating the DCF-DS method, we achieved first place in the realistic single-channel track of the CHiME-8 NOTSOFAR-1 challenge. We also perform the evaluation on the open LibriCSS dataset, achieving a new state-of-the-art performance on single-channel speech recognition.

Seeing Through Pixel Motion: Learning Obstacle Avoidance from Optical Flow with One Camera

Optical flow captures the motion of pixels in an image sequence over time, providing information about movement, depth, and environmental structure. Flying insects utilize this information to navigate and avoid obstacles, allowing them to execute highly agile maneuvers even in complex environments. Despite its potential, autonomous flying robots have yet to fully leverage this motion information to achieve comparable levels of agility and robustness. Challenges of control from optical flow include extracting accurate optical flow at high speeds, handling noisy estimation, and ensuring robust performance in complex environments. To address these challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end system for quadrotor obstacle avoidance using monocular optical flow. We develop an efficient differentiable simulator coupled with a simplified quadrotor model, allowing our policy to be trained directly through first-order gradient optimization. Additionally, we introduce a central flow attention mechanism and an action-guided active sensing strategy that enhances the policy's focus on task-relevant optical flow observations to enable more responsive decision-making during flight. Our system is validated both in simulation and the real world using an FPV racing drone. Despite being trained in a simple environment in simulation, our system is validated both in simulation and the real world using an FPV racing drone. Despite being trained in a simple environment in simulation, our system demonstrates agile and robust flight in various unknown, cluttered environments in the real world at speeds of up to 6m/s.

WildOcc: A Benchmark for Off-Road 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction

3D semantic occupancy prediction is an essential part of autonomous driving, focusing on capturing the geometric details of scenes. Off-road environments are rich in geometric information, therefore it is suitable for 3D semantic occupancy prediction tasks to reconstruct such scenes. However, most of researches concentrate on on-road environments, and few methods are designed for off-road 3D semantic occupancy prediction due to the lack of relevant datasets and benchmarks. In response to this gap, we introduce WildOcc, to our knowledge, the first benchmark to provide dense occupancy annotations for off-road 3D semantic occupancy prediction tasks. A ground truth generation pipeline is proposed in this paper, which employs a coarse-to-fine reconstruction to achieve a more realistic result. Moreover, we introduce a multi-modal 3D semantic occupancy prediction framework, which fuses spatio-temporal information from multi-frame images and point clouds at voxel level. In addition, a cross-modality distillation function is introduced, which transfers geometric knowledge from point clouds to image features.

Autonomous Driving in Unstructured Environments: How Far Have We Come?

Research on autonomous driving in unstructured outdoor environments is less advanced than in structured urban settings due to challenges like environmental diversities and scene complexity. These environments-such as rural areas and rugged terrains-pose unique obstacles that are not common in structured urban areas. Despite these difficulties, autonomous driving in unstructured outdoor environments is crucial for applications in agriculture, mining, and military operations. Our survey reviews over 250 papers for autonomous driving in unstructured outdoor environments, covering offline mapping, pose estimation, environmental perception, path planning, end-to-end autonomous driving, datasets, and relevant challenges. We also discuss emerging trends and future research directions. This review aims to consolidate knowledge and encourage further research for autonomous driving in unstructured environments. To support ongoing work, we maintain an active repository with up-to-date literature and open-source projects at: https://github.com/chaytonmin/Survey-Autonomous-Driving-in-Unstructured-Environments.

Proto-OOD: Enhancing OOD Object Detection with Prototype Feature Similarity

The limited training samples for object detectors commonly result in low accuracy out-of-distribution (OOD) object detection. We have observed that feature vectors of the same class tend to cluster tightly in feature space, whereas those of different classes are more scattered. This insight motivates us to leverage feature similarity for OOD detection. Drawing on the concept of prototypes prevalent in few-shot learning, we introduce a novel network architecture, Proto-OOD, designed for this purpose. Proto-OOD enhances prototype representativeness through contrastive loss and identifies OOD data by assessing the similarity between input features and prototypes. It employs a negative embedding generator to create negative embedding, which are then used to train the similarity module. Proto-OOD achieves significantly lower FPR95 in MS-COCO dataset and higher mAP for Pascal VOC dataset, when utilizing Pascal VOC as ID dataset and MS-COCO as OOD dataset. Additionally, we identify limitations in existing evaluation metrics and propose an enhanced evaluation protocol.

TeFF: Tracking-enhanced Forgetting-free Few-shot 3D LiDAR Semantic Segmentation

In autonomous driving, 3D LiDAR plays a crucial role in understanding the vehicle's surroundings. However, the newly emerged, unannotated objects presents few-shot learning problem for semantic segmentation. This paper addresses the limitations of current few-shot semantic segmentation by exploiting the temporal continuity of LiDAR data. Employing a tracking model to generate pseudo-ground-truths from a sequence of LiDAR frames, our method significantly augments the dataset, enhancing the model's ability to learn on novel classes. However, this approach introduces a data imbalance biased to novel data that presents a new challenge of catastrophic forgetting. To mitigate this, we incorporate LoRA, a technique that reduces the number of trainable parameters, thereby preserving the model's performance on base classes while improving its adaptability to novel classes. This work represents a significant step forward in few-shot 3D LiDAR semantic segmentation for autonomous driving. Our code is available at https://github.com/junbao-zhou/Track-no-forgetting.

Back to Newton's Laws: Learning Vision-based Agile Flight via Differentiable Physics

Swarm navigation in cluttered environments is a grand challenge in robotics. This work combines deep learning with first-principle physics through differentiable simulation to enable autonomous navigation of multiple aerial robots through complex environments at high speed. Our approach optimizes a neural network control policy directly by backpropagating loss gradients through the robot simulation using a simple point-mass physics model and a depth rendering engine. Despite this simplicity, our method excels in challenging tasks for both multi-agent and single-agent applications with zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. In multi-agent scenarios, our system demonstrates self-organized behavior, enabling autonomous coordination without communication or centralized planning - an achievement not seen in existing traditional or learning-based methods. In single-agent scenarios, our system achieves a 90% success rate in navigating through complex environments, significantly surpassing the 60% success rate of the previous state-of-the-art approach. Our system can operate without state estimation and adapt to dynamic obstacles. In real-world forest environments, it navigates at speeds up to 20 m/s, doubling the speed of previous imitation learning-based solutions. Notably, all these capabilities are deployed on a budget-friendly $21 computer, costing less than 5% of a GPU-equipped board used in existing systems. Video demonstrations are available at https://youtu.be/LKg9hJqc2cc.

PID: Physics-Informed Diffusion Model for Infrared Image Generation

Infrared imaging technology has gained significant attention for its reliable sensing ability in low visibility conditions, prompting many studies to convert the abundant RGB images to infrared images. However, most existing image translation methods treat infrared images as a stylistic variation, neglecting the underlying physical laws, which limits their practical application. To address these issues, we propose a Physics-Informed Diffusion (PID) model for translating RGB images to infrared images that adhere to physical laws. Our method leverages the iterative optimization of the diffusion model and incorporates strong physical constraints based on prior knowledge of infrared laws during training. This approach enhances the similarity between translated infrared images and the real infrared domain without increasing extra training parameters. Experimental results demonstrate that PID significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/fangyuanmao/PID.

SRFUND: A Multi-Granularity Hierarchical Structure Reconstruction Benchmark in Form Understanding

Accurately identifying and organizing textual content is crucial for the automation of document processing in the field of form understanding. Existing datasets, such as FUNSD and XFUND, support entity classification and relationship prediction tasks but are typically limited to local and entity-level annotations. This limitation overlooks the hierarchically structured representation of documents, constraining comprehensive understanding of complex forms. To address this issue, we present the SRFUND, a hierarchically structured multi-task form understanding benchmark. SRFUND provides refined annotations on top of the original FUNSD and XFUND datasets, encompassing five tasks: (1) word to text-line merging, (2) text-line to entity merging, (3) entity category classification, (4) item table localization, and (5) entity-based full-document hierarchical structure recovery. We meticulously supplemented the original dataset with missing annotations at various levels of granularity and added detailed annotations for multi-item table regions within the forms. Additionally, we introduce global hierarchical structure dependencies for entity relation prediction tasks, surpassing traditional local key-value associations. The SRFUND dataset includes eight languages including English, Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, making it a powerful tool for cross-lingual form understanding. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the SRFUND dataset presents new challenges and significant opportunities in handling diverse layouts and global hierarchical structures of forms, thus providing deep insights into the field of form understanding. The original dataset and implementations of baseline methods are available at https://sprateam-ustc.github.io/SRFUND