EGP3D: Edge-guided Geometric Preserving 3D Point Cloud Super-resolution for RGB-D camera

Point clouds or depth images captured by current RGB-D cameras often suffer from low resolution, rendering them insufficient for applications such as 3D reconstruction and robots. Existing point cloud super-resolution (PCSR) methods are either constrained by geometric artifacts or lack attention to edge details. To address these issues, we propose an edge-guided geometric-preserving 3D point cloud super-resolution (EGP3D) method tailored for RGB-D cameras. Our approach innovatively optimizes the point cloud with an edge constraint on a projected 2D space, thereby ensuring high-quality edge preservation in the 3D PCSR task. To tackle geometric optimization challenges in super-resolution point clouds, particularly preserving edge shapes and smoothness, we introduce a multi-faceted loss function that simultaneously optimizes the Chamfer distance, Hausdorff distance, and gradient smoothness. Existing datasets used for point cloud upsampling are predominantly synthetic and inadequately represent real-world scenarios, neglecting noise and stray light effects. To address the scarcity of realistic RGB-D data for PCSR tasks, we built a dataset that captures real-world noise and stray-light effects, offering a more accurate representation of authentic environments. Validated through simulations and real-world experiments, the proposed method exhibited superior performance in preserving edge clarity and geometric details.

LOMA: Language-assisted Semantic Occupancy Network via Triplane Mamba

Vision-based 3D occupancy prediction has become a popular research task due to its versatility and affordability. Nowadays, conventional methods usually project the image-based vision features to 3D space and learn the geometric information through the attention mechanism, enabling the 3D semantic occupancy prediction. However, these works usually face two main challenges: 1) Limited geometric information. Due to the lack of geometric information in the image itself, it is challenging to directly predict 3D space information, especially in large-scale outdoor scenes. 2) Local restricted interaction. Due to the quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism, they often use modified local attention to fuse features, resulting in a restricted fusion. To address these problems, in this paper, we propose a language-assisted 3D semantic occupancy prediction network, named LOMA. In the proposed vision-language framework, we first introduce a VL-aware Scene Generator (VSG) module to generate the 3D language feature of the scene. By leveraging the vision-language model, this module provides implicit geometric knowledge and explicit semantic information from the language. Furthermore, we present a Tri-plane Fusion Mamba (TFM) block to efficiently fuse the 3D language feature and 3D vision feature. The proposed module not only fuses the two features with global modeling but also avoids too much computation costs. Experiments on the SemanticKITTI and SSCBench-KITTI360 datasets show that our algorithm achieves new state-of-the-art performances in both geometric and semantic completion tasks. Our code will be open soon.

Machine Learning Information Retrieval and Summarisation to Support Systematic Review on Outcomes Based Contracting

As academic literature proliferates, traditional review methods are increasingly challenged by the sheer volume and diversity of available research. This article presents a study that aims to address these challenges by enhancing the efficiency and scope of systematic reviews in the social sciences through advanced machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) tools. In particular, we focus on automating stages within the systematic reviewing process that are time-intensive and repetitive for human annotators and which lend themselves to immediate scalability through tools such as information retrieval and summarisation guided by expert advice. The article concludes with a summary of lessons learnt regarding the integrated approach towards systematic reviews and future directions for improvement, including explainability.

StreamingBench: Assessing the Gap for MLLMs to Achieve Streaming Video Understanding

The rapid development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has expanded their capabilities from image comprehension to video understanding. However, most of these MLLMs focus primarily on offline video comprehension, necessitating extensive processing of all video frames before any queries can be made. This presents a significant gap compared to the human ability to watch, listen, think, and respond to streaming inputs in real time, highlighting the limitations of current MLLMs. In this paper, we introduce StreamingBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the streaming video understanding capabilities of MLLMs. StreamingBench assesses three core aspects of streaming video understanding: (1) real-time visual understanding, (2) omni-source understanding, and (3) contextual understanding. The benchmark consists of 18 tasks, featuring 900 videos and 4,500 human-curated QA pairs. Each video features five questions presented at different time points to simulate a continuous streaming scenario. We conduct experiments on StreamingBench with 13 open-source and proprietary MLLMs and find that even the most advanced proprietary MLLMs like Gemini 1.5 Pro and GPT-4o perform significantly below human-level streaming video understanding capabilities. We hope our work can facilitate further advancements for MLLMs, empowering them to approach human-level video comprehension and interaction in more realistic scenarios.

Fully Asynchronous Neuromorphic Perception for Mobile Robot Dodging with Loihi Chips

Sparse and asynchronous sensing and processing in natural organisms lead to ultra low-latency and energy-efficient perception. Event cameras, known as neuromorphic vision sensors, are designed to mimic these characteristics. However, fully utilizing the sparse and asynchronous event stream remains challenging. Influenced by the mature algorithms of standard cameras, most existing event-based algorithms still rely on the "group of events" processing paradigm (e.g., event frames, 3D voxels) when handling event streams. This paradigm encounters issues such as feature loss, event stacking, and high computational burden, which deviates from the intended purpose of event cameras. To address these issues, we propose a fully asynchronous neuromorphic paradigm that integrates event cameras, spiking networks, and neuromorphic processors (Intel Loihi). This paradigm can faithfully process each event asynchronously as it arrives, mimicking the spike-driven signal processing in biological brains. We compare the proposed paradigm with the existing "group of events" processing paradigm in detail on the real mobile robot dodging task. Experimental results show that our scheme exhibits better robustness than frame-based methods with different time windows and light conditions. Additionally, the energy consumption per inference of our scheme on the embedded Loihi processor is only 4.30% of that of the event spike tensor method on NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX with energy-saving mode, and 1.64% of that of the event frame method on the same neuromorphic processor. As far as we know, this is the first time that a fully asynchronous neuromorphic paradigm has been implemented for solving sequential tasks on real mobile robot.

Towards Graph Prompt Learning: A Survey and Beyond

Large-scale "pre-train and prompt learning" paradigms have demonstrated remarkable adaptability, enabling broad applications across diverse domains such as question answering, image recognition, and multimodal retrieval. This approach fully leverages the potential of large-scale pre-trained models, reducing downstream data requirements and computational costs while enhancing model applicability across various tasks. Graphs, as versatile data structures that capture relationships between entities, play pivotal roles in fields such as social network analysis, recommender systems, and biological graphs. Despite the success of pre-train and prompt learning paradigms in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), their application in graph domains remains nascent. In graph-structured data, not only do the node and edge features often have disparate distributions, but the topological structures also differ significantly. This diversity in graph data can lead to incompatible patterns or gaps between pre-training and fine-tuning on downstream graphs. We aim to bridge this gap by summarizing methods for alleviating these disparities. This includes exploring prompt design methodologies, comparing related techniques, assessing application scenarios and datasets, and identifying unresolved problems and challenges. This survey categorizes over 100 relevant works in this field, summarizing general design principles and the latest applications, including text-attributed graphs, molecules, proteins, and recommendation systems. Through this extensive review, we provide a foundational understanding of graph prompt learning, aiming to impact not only the graph mining community but also the broader Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) community.

EV-MGDispNet: Motion-Guided Event-Based Stereo Disparity Estimation Network with Left-Right Consistency

Event cameras have the potential to revolutionize the field of robot vision, particularly in areas like stereo disparity estimation, owing to their high temporal resolution and high dynamic range. Many studies use deep learning for event camera stereo disparity estimation. However, these methods fail to fully exploit the temporal information in the event stream to acquire clear event representations. Additionally, there is room for further reduction in pixel shifts in the feature maps before constructing the cost volume. In this paper, we propose EV-MGDispNet, a novel event-based stereo disparity estimation method. Firstly, we propose an edge-aware aggregation (EAA) module, which fuses event frames and motion confidence maps to generate a novel clear event representation. Then, we propose a motion-guided attention (MGA) module, where motion confidence maps utilize deformable transformer encoders to enhance the feature map with more accurate edges. Finally, we also add a census left-right consistency loss function to enhance the left-right consistency of stereo event representation. Through conducting experiments within challenging real-world driving scenarios, we validate that our method outperforms currently known state-of-the-art methods in terms of mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE) metrics.

A Semi-supervised Multi-channel Graph Convolutional Network for Query Classification in E-commerce

Query intent classification is an essential module for customers to find desired products on the e-commerce application quickly. Most existing query intent classification methods rely on the users' click behavior as a supervised signal to construct training samples. However, these methods based entirely on posterior labels may lead to serious category imbalance problems because of the Matthew effect in click samples. Compared with popular categories, it is difficult for products under long-tail categories to obtain traffic and user clicks, which makes the models unable to detect users' intent for products under long-tail categories. This in turn aggravates the problem that long-tail categories cannot obtain traffic, forming a vicious circle. In addition, due to the randomness of the user's click, the posterior label is unstable for the query with similar semantics, which makes the model very sensitive to the input, leading to an unstable and incomplete recall of categories. In this paper, we propose a novel Semi-supervised Multi-channel Graph Convolutional Network (SMGCN) to address the above problems from the perspective of label association and semi-supervised learning. SMGCN extends category information and enhances the posterior label by utilizing the similarity score between the query and categories. Furthermore, it leverages the co-occurrence and semantic similarity graph of categories to strengthen the relations among labels and weaken the influence of posterior label instability. We conduct extensive offline and online A/B experiments, and the experimental results show that SMGCN significantly outperforms the strong baselines, which shows its effectiveness and practicality.

StreamMOS: Streaming Moving Object Segmentation with Multi-View Perception and Dual-Span Memory

Moving object segmentation based on LiDAR is a crucial and challenging task for autonomous driving and mobile robotics. Most approaches explore spatio-temporal information from LiDAR sequences to predict moving objects in the current frame. However, they often focus on transferring temporal cues in a single inference and regard every prediction as independent of others. This may cause inconsistent segmentation results for the same object in different frames. To overcome this issue, we propose a streaming network with a memory mechanism, called StreamMOS, to build the association of features and predictions among multiple inferences. Specifically, we utilize a short-term memory to convey historical features, which can be regarded as spatial prior of moving objects and adopted to enhance current inference by temporal fusion. Meanwhile, we build a long-term memory to store previous predictions and exploit them to refine the present forecast at voxel and instance levels through voting. Besides, we present multi-view encoder with cascade projection and asymmetric convolution to extract motion feature of objects in different representations. Extensive experiments validate that our algorithm gets competitive performance on SemanticKITTI and Sipailou Campus datasets. Code will be released at https://github.com/NEU-REAL/StreamMOS.git.

FlowTrack: Point-level Flow Network for 3D Single Object Tracking

3D single object tracking (SOT) is a crucial task in fields of mobile robotics and autonomous driving. Traditional motion-based approaches achieve target tracking by estimating the relative movement of target between two consecutive frames. However, they usually overlook local motion information of the target and fail to exploit historical frame information effectively. To overcome the above limitations, we propose a point-level flow method with multi-frame information for 3D SOT task, called FlowTrack. Specifically, by estimating the flow for each point in the target, our method could capture the local motion details of target, thereby improving the tracking performance. At the same time, to handle scenes with sparse points, we present a learnable target feature as the bridge to efficiently integrate target information from past frames. Moreover, we design a novel Instance Flow Head to transform dense point-level flow into instance-level motion, effectively aggregating local motion information to obtain global target motion. Finally, our method achieves competitive performance with improvements of 5.9% on the KITTI dataset and 2.9% on NuScenes. The code will be made publicly available soon.