Hydra-MDP++: Advancing End-to-End Driving via Expert-Guided Hydra-Distillation

Hydra-MDP++ introduces a novel teacher-student knowledge distillation framework with a multi-head decoder that learns from human demonstrations and rule-based experts. Using a lightweight ResNet-34 network without complex components, the framework incorporates expanded evaluation metrics, including traffic light compliance (TL), lane-keeping ability (LK), and extended comfort (EC) to address unsafe behaviors not captured by traditional NAVSIM-derived teachers. Like other end-to-end autonomous driving approaches, \hydra processes raw images directly without relying on privileged perception signals. Hydra-MDP++ achieves state-of-the-art performance by integrating these components with a 91.0% drive score on NAVSIM through scaling to a V2-99 image encoder, demonstrating its effectiveness in handling diverse driving scenarios while maintaining computational efficiency.

One-for-More: Continual Diffusion Model for Anomaly Detection

With the rise of generative models, there is a growing interest in unifying all tasks within a generative framework. Anomaly detection methods also fall into this scope and utilize diffusion models to generate or reconstruct normal samples when given arbitrary anomaly images. However, our study found that the diffusion model suffers from severe ``faithfulness hallucination'' and ``catastrophic forgetting'', which can't meet the unpredictable pattern increments. To mitigate the above problems, we propose a continual diffusion model that uses gradient projection to achieve stable continual learning. Gradient projection deploys a regularization on the model updating by modifying the gradient towards the direction protecting the learned knowledge. But as a double-edged sword, it also requires huge memory costs brought by the Markov process. Hence, we propose an iterative singular value decomposition method based on the transitive property of linear representation, which consumes tiny memory and incurs almost no performance loss. Finally, considering the risk of ``over-fitting'' to normal images of the diffusion model, we propose an anomaly-masked network to enhance the condition mechanism of the diffusion model. For continual anomaly detection, ours achieves first place in 17/18 settings on MVTec and VisA. Code is available at https://github.com/FuNz-0/One-for-More

Diffusion Implicit Policy for Unpaired Scene-aware Motion Synthesis

Human motion generation is a long-standing problem, and scene-aware motion synthesis has been widely researched recently due to its numerous applications. Prevailing methods rely heavily on paired motion-scene data whose quantity is limited. Meanwhile, it is difficult to generalize to diverse scenes when trained only on a few specific ones. Thus, we propose a unified framework, termed Diffusion Implicit Policy (DIP), for scene-aware motion synthesis, where paired motion-scene data are no longer necessary. In this framework, we disentangle human-scene interaction from motion synthesis during training and then introduce an interaction-based implicit policy into motion diffusion during inference. Synthesized motion can be derived through iterative diffusion denoising and implicit policy optimization, thus motion naturalness and interaction plausibility can be maintained simultaneously. The proposed implicit policy optimizes the intermediate noised motion in a GAN Inversion manner to maintain motion continuity and control keyframe poses though the ControlNet branch and motion inpainting. For long-term motion synthesis, we introduce motion blending for stable transitions between multiple sub-tasks, where motions are fused in rotation power space and translation linear space. The proposed method is evaluated on synthesized scenes with ShapeNet furniture, and real scenes from PROX and Replica. Results show that our framework presents better motion naturalness and interaction plausibility than cutting-edge methods. This also indicates the feasibility of utilizing the DIP for motion synthesis in more general tasks and versatile scenes. https://jingyugong.github.io/DiffusionImplicitPolicy/

DEMONet: Underwater Acoustic Target Recognition based on Multi-Expert Network and Cross-Temporal Variational Autoencoder

Building a robust underwater acoustic recognition system in real-world scenarios is challenging due to the complex underwater environment and the dynamic motion states of targets. A promising optimization approach is to leverage the intrinsic physical characteristics of targets, which remain invariable regardless of environmental conditions, to provide robust insights. However, our study reveals that while physical characteristics exhibit robust properties, they may lack class-specific discriminative patterns. Consequently, directly incorporating physical characteristics into model training can potentially introduce unintended inductive biases, leading to performance degradation. To utilize the benefits of physical characteristics while mitigating possible detrimental effects, we propose DEMONet in this study, which utilizes the detection of envelope modulation on noise (DEMON) to provide robust insights into the shaft frequency or blade counts of targets. DEMONet is a multi-expert network that allocates various underwater signals to their best-matched expert layer based on DEMON spectra for fine-grained signal processing. Thereinto, DEMON spectra are solely responsible for providing implicit physical characteristics without establishing a mapping relationship with the target category. Furthermore, to mitigate noise and spurious modulation spectra in DEMON features, we introduce a cross-temporal alignment strategy and employ a variational autoencoder (VAE) to reconstruct noise-resistant DEMON spectra to replace the raw DEMON features. The effectiveness of the proposed DEMONet with cross-temporal VAE was primarily evaluated on the DeepShip dataset and our proprietary datasets. Experimental results demonstrated that our approach could achieve state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.

Advancing Robust Underwater Acoustic Target Recognition through Multi-task Learning and Multi-Gate Mixture-of-Experts

Underwater acoustic target recognition has emerged as a prominent research area within the field of underwater acoustics. However, the current availability of authentic underwater acoustic signal recordings remains limited, which hinders data-driven acoustic recognition models from learning robust patterns of targets from a limited set of intricate underwater signals, thereby compromising their stability in practical applications. To overcome these limitations, this study proposes a recognition framework called M3 (Multi-task, Multi-gate, Multi-expert) to enhance the model's ability to capture robust patterns by making it aware of the inherent properties of targets. In this framework, an auxiliary task that focuses on target properties, such as estimating target size, is designed. The auxiliary task then shares parameters with the recognition task to realize multi-task learning. This paradigm allows the model to concentrate on shared information across tasks and identify robust patterns of targets in a regularized manner, thereby enhancing the model's generalization ability. Moreover, M3 incorporates multi-expert and multi-gate mechanisms, allowing for the allocation of distinct parameter spaces to various underwater signals. This enables the model to process intricate signal patterns in a fine-grained and differentiated manner. To evaluate the effectiveness of M3, extensive experiments were implemented on the ShipsEar underwater ship-radiated noise dataset. The results substantiate that M3 has the ability to outperform the most advanced single-task recognition models, thereby achieving the state-of-the-art performance.

Adversarial multi-task underwater acoustic target recognition: towards robustness against various influential factors

Underwater acoustic target recognition based on passive sonar faces numerous challenges in practical maritime applications. One of the main challenges lies in the susceptibility of signal characteristics to diverse environmental conditions and data acquisition configurations, which can lead to instability in recognition systems. While significant efforts have been dedicated to addressing these influential factors in other domains of underwater acoustics, they are often neglected in the field of underwater acoustic target recognition. To overcome this limitation, this study designs auxiliary tasks that model influential factors (e.g., source range, water column depth, or wind speed) based on available annotations and adopts a multi-task framework to connect these factors to the recognition task. Furthermore, we integrate an adversarial learning mechanism into the multi-task framework to prompt the model to extract representations that are robust against influential factors. Through extensive experiments and analyses on the ShipsEar dataset, our proposed adversarial multi-task model demonstrates its capacity to effectively model the influential factors and achieve state-of-the-art performance on the 12-class recognition task.

Fusion-then-Distillation: Toward Cross-modal Positive Distillation for Domain Adaptive 3D Semantic Segmentation

In cross-modal unsupervised domain adaptation, a model trained on source-domain data (e.g., synthetic) is adapted to target-domain data (e.g., real-world) without access to target annotation. Previous methods seek to mutually mimic cross-modal outputs in each domain, which enforces a class probability distribution that is agreeable in different domains. However, they overlook the complementarity brought by the heterogeneous fusion in cross-modal learning. In light of this, we propose a novel fusion-then-distillation (FtD++) method to explore cross-modal positive distillation of the source and target domains for 3D semantic segmentation. FtD++ realizes distribution consistency between outputs not only for 2D images and 3D point clouds but also for source-domain and augment-domain. Specially, our method contains three key ingredients. First, we present a model-agnostic feature fusion module to generate the cross-modal fusion representation for establishing a latent space. In this space, two modalities are enforced maximum correlation and complementarity. Second, the proposed cross-modal positive distillation preserves the complete information of multi-modal input and combines the semantic content of the source domain with the style of the target domain, thereby achieving domain-modality alignment. Finally, cross-modal debiased pseudo-labeling is devised to model the uncertainty of pseudo-labels via a self-training manner. Extensive experiments report state-of-the-art results on several domain adaptive scenarios under unsupervised and semi-supervised settings. Code is available at https://github.com/Barcaaaa/FtD-PlusPlus.

LLaCA: Multimodal Large Language Continual Assistant

Instruction tuning guides the Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in aligning different modalities by designing text instructions, which seems to be an essential technique to enhance the capabilities and controllability of foundation models. In this framework, Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning (MCIT) is adopted to continually instruct MLLMs to follow human intent in sequential datasets. We observe existing gradient update would heavily destroy the tuning performance on previous datasets and the zero-shot ability during continual instruction tuning. Exponential Moving Average (EMA) update policy owns the ability to trace previous parameters, which can aid in decreasing forgetting. However, its stable balance weight cannot deal with the ever-changing datasets, leading to the out-of-balance between plasticity and stability of MLLMs. In this paper, we propose a method called Multimodal Large Language Continual Assistant (LLaCA) to address the challenge. Starting from the trade-off prerequisite and EMA update, we propose the plasticity and stability ideal condition. Based on Taylor expansion in the loss function, we find the optimal balance weight is basically according to the gradient information and previous parameters. We automatically determine the balance weight and significantly improve the performance. Through comprehensive experiments on LLaVA-1.5 in a continual visual-question-answering benchmark, compared with baseline, our approach not only highly improves anti-forgetting ability (with reducing forgetting from 22.67 to 2.68), but also significantly promotes continual tuning performance (with increasing average accuracy from 41.31 to 61.89). Our code will be published soon.

Data-free Distillation with Degradation-prompt Diffusion for Multi-weather Image Restoration

Multi-weather image restoration has witnessed incredible progress, while the increasing model capacity and expensive data acquisition impair its applications in memory-limited devices. Data-free distillation provides an alternative for allowing to learn a lightweight student model from a pre-trained teacher model without relying on the original training data. The existing data-free learning methods mainly optimize the models with the pseudo data generated by GANs or the real data collected from the Internet. However, they inevitably suffer from the problems of unstable training or domain shifts with the original data. In this paper, we propose a novel Data-free Distillation with Degradation-prompt Diffusion framework for multi-weather Image Restoration (D4IR). It replaces GANs with pre-trained diffusion models to avoid model collapse and incorporates a degradation-aware prompt adapter to facilitate content-driven conditional diffusion for generating domain-related images. Specifically, a contrast-based degradation prompt adapter is firstly designed to capture degradation-aware prompts from web-collected degraded images. Then, the collected unpaired clean images are perturbed to latent features of stable diffusion, and conditioned with the degradation-aware prompts to synthesize new domain-related degraded images for knowledge distillation. Experiments illustrate that our proposal achieves comparable performance to the model distilled with original training data, and is even superior to other mainstream unsupervised methods.

Harmonizing Visual Text Comprehension and Generation

In this work, we present TextHarmony, a unified and versatile multimodal generative model proficient in comprehending and generating visual text. Simultaneously generating images and texts typically results in performance degradation due to the inherent inconsistency between vision and language modalities. To overcome this challenge, existing approaches resort to modality-specific data for supervised fine-tuning, necessitating distinct model instances. We propose Slide-LoRA, which dynamically aggregates modality-specific and modality-agnostic LoRA experts, partially decoupling the multimodal generation space. Slide-LoRA harmonizes the generation of vision and language within a singular model instance, thereby facilitating a more unified generative process. Additionally, we develop a high-quality image caption dataset, DetailedTextCaps-100K, synthesized with a sophisticated closed-source MLLM to enhance visual text generation capabilities further. Comprehensive experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Empowered by Slide-LoRA, TextHarmony achieves comparable performance to modality-specific fine-tuning results with only a 2% increase in parameters and shows an average improvement of 2.5% in visual text comprehension tasks and 4.0% in visual text generation tasks. Our work delineates the viability of an integrated approach to multimodal generation within the visual text domain, setting a foundation for subsequent inquiries.