One for All: Multi-Domain Joint Training for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection

The current trend in computer vision is to utilize one universal model to address all various tasks. Achieving such a universal model inevitably requires incorporating multi-domain data for joint training to learn across multiple problem scenarios. In point cloud based 3D object detection, however, such multi-domain joint training is highly challenging, because large domain gaps among point clouds from different datasets lead to the severe domain-interference problem. In this paper, we propose \textbf{OneDet3D}, a universal one-for-all model that addresses 3D detection across different domains, including diverse indoor and outdoor scenes, within the \emph{same} framework and only \emph{one} set of parameters. We propose the domain-aware partitioning in scatter and context, guided by a routing mechanism, to address the data interference issue, and further incorporate the text modality for a language-guided classification to unify the multi-dataset label spaces and mitigate the category interference issue. The fully sparse structure and anchor-free head further accommodate point clouds with significant scale disparities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the strong universal ability of OneDet3D to utilize only one trained model for addressing almost all 3D object detection tasks.

Efficient Mixture-of-Expert for Video-based Driver State and Physiological Multi-task Estimation in Conditional Autonomous Driving

Road safety remains a critical challenge worldwide, with approximately 1.35 million fatalities annually attributed to traffic accidents, often due to human errors. As we advance towards higher levels of vehicle automation, challenges still exist, as driving with automation can cognitively over-demand drivers if they engage in non-driving-related tasks (NDRTs), or lead to drowsiness if driving was the sole task. This calls for the urgent need for an effective Driver Monitoring System (DMS) that can evaluate cognitive load and drowsiness in SAE Level-2/3 autonomous driving contexts. In this study, we propose a novel multi-task DMS, termed VDMoE, which leverages RGB video input to monitor driver states non-invasively. By utilizing key facial features to minimize computational load and integrating remote Photoplethysmography (rPPG) for physiological insights, our approach enhances detection accuracy while maintaining efficiency. Additionally, we optimize the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework to accommodate multi-modal inputs and improve performance across different tasks. A novel prior-inclusive regularization method is introduced to align model outputs with statistical priors, thus accelerating convergence and mitigating overfitting risks. We validate our method with the creation of a new dataset (MCDD), which comprises RGB video and physiological indicators from 42 participants, and two public datasets. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of VDMoE in monitoring driver states, contributing to safer autonomous driving systems. The code and data will be released.

PortLLM: Personalizing Evolving Large Language Models with Training-Free and Portable Model Patches

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly shape the AI landscape, fine-tuning pretrained models has become more popular than in the pre-LLM era for achieving optimal performance in domain-specific tasks. However, pretrained LLMs such as ChatGPT are periodically evolved, i.e., model parameters are frequently updated), making it challenging for downstream users with limited resources to keep up with fine-tuning the newest LLMs for their domain application. Even though fine-tuning costs have nowadays been reduced thanks to the innovations of parameter-efficient fine-tuning such as LoRA, not all downstream users have adequate computing for frequent personalization. Moreover, access to fine-tuning datasets, particularly in sensitive domains such as healthcare, could be time-restrictive, making it crucial to retain the knowledge encoded in earlier fine-tuned rounds for future adaptation. In this paper, we present PortLLM, a training-free framework that (i) creates an initial lightweight model update patch to capture domain-specific knowledge, and (ii) allows a subsequent seamless plugging for the continual personalization of evolved LLM at minimal cost. Our extensive experiments cover seven representative datasets, from easier question-answering tasks {BoolQ, SST2} to harder reasoning tasks {WinoGrande, GSM8K}, and models including {Mistral-7B, Llama2, Llama3.1, and Gemma2}, validating the portability of our designed model patches and showcasing the effectiveness of our proposed framework. For instance, PortLLM achieves comparable performance to LoRA fine-tuning with reductions of up to 12.2x in GPU memory usage. Finally, we provide theoretical justifications to understand the portability of our model update patches, which offers new insights into the theoretical dimension of LLMs' personalization.

Query-by-Example Keyword Spotting Using Spectral-Temporal Graph Attentive Pooling and Multi-Task Learning

Existing keyword spotting (KWS) systems primarily rely on predefined keyword phrases. However, the ability to recognize customized keywords is crucial for tailoring interactions with intelligent devices. In this paper, we present a novel Query-by-Example (QbyE) KWS system that employs spectral-temporal graph attentive pooling and multi-task learning. This framework aims to effectively learn speaker-invariant and linguistic-informative embeddings for QbyE KWS tasks. Within this framework, we investigate three distinct network architectures for encoder modeling: LiCoNet, Conformer and ECAPA_TDNN. The experimental results on a substantial internal dataset of $629$ speakers have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed QbyE framework in maximizing the potential of simpler models such as LiCoNet. Particularly, LiCoNet, which is 13x more efficient, achieves comparable performance to the computationally intensive Conformer model (1.98% vs. 1.63\% FRR at 0.3 FAs/Hr).

Disentangled Training with Adversarial Examples For Robust Small-footprint Keyword Spotting

A keyword spotting (KWS) engine that is continuously running on device is exposed to various speech signals that are usually unseen before. It is a challenging problem to build a small-footprint and high-performing KWS model with robustness under different acoustic environments. In this paper, we explore how to effectively apply adversarial examples to improve KWS robustness. We propose datasource-aware disentangled learning with adversarial examples to reduce the mismatch between the original and adversarial data as well as the mismatch across original training datasources. The KWS model architecture is based on depth-wise separable convolution and a simple attention module. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed learning strategy improves false reject rate by $40.31%$ at $1%$ false accept rate on the internal dataset, compared to the strongest baseline without using adversarial examples. Our best-performing system achieves $98.06%$ accuracy on the Google Speech Commands V1 dataset.

Toward Improving Synthetic Audio Spoofing Detection Robustness via Meta-Learning and Disentangled Training With Adversarial Examples

Advances in automatic speaker verification (ASV) promote research into the formulation of spoofing detection systems for real-world applications. The performance of ASV systems can be degraded severely by multiple types of spoofing attacks, namely, synthetic speech (SS), voice conversion (VC), replay, twins and impersonation, especially in the case of unseen synthetic spoofing attacks. A reliable and robust spoofing detection system can act as a security gate to filter out spoofing attacks instead of having them reach the ASV system. A weighted additive angular margin loss is proposed to address the data imbalance issue, and different margins has been assigned to improve generalization to unseen spoofing attacks in this study. Meanwhile, we incorporate a meta-learning loss function to optimize differences between the embeddings of support versus query set in order to learn a spoofing-category-independent embedding space for utterances. Furthermore, we craft adversarial examples by adding imperceptible perturbations to spoofing speech as a data augmentation strategy, then we use an auxiliary batch normalization (BN) to guarantee that corresponding normalization statistics are performed exclusively on the adversarial examples. Additionally, A simple attention module is integrated into the residual block to refine the feature extraction process. Evaluation results on the Logical Access (LA) track of the ASVspoof 2019 corpus provides confirmation of our proposed approaches' effectiveness in terms of a pooled EER of 0.87%, and a min t-DCF of 0.0277. These advancements offer effective options to reduce the impact of spoofing attacks on voice recognition/authentication systems.

Multi-Frequency Resonant Circuit Based Multi-User Emergency Through-the-Earth Communication with Magnetic Induction

Magnetic induction (MI) is an effective technique in emergency through-the-earth communications due to the higher penetration efficiency and lower propagation loss as compared with electromagnetic wave communication. How to cancel the interference between different users and enhance the effectiveness of multi-user transmissions is imperative for the practical application of MI communication. In this paper, we use multi-frequency resonant circuit to establish multiple resonant frequencies for MI communication. The transmissions corresponding to different users operate at different resonant frequencies and multi-user interferences can be naturally mitigated. Numerical results verify our theoretical analyses and show that the proposed system can significantly enhance the performance.

Characterizing Disparity Between Edge Models and High-Accuracy Base Models for Vision Tasks

Edge devices, with their widely varying capabilities, support a diverse range of edge AI models. This raises the question: how does an edge model differ from a high-accuracy (base) model for the same task? We introduce XDELTA, a novel explainable AI tool that explains differences between a high-accuracy base model and a computationally efficient but lower-accuracy edge model. To achieve this, we propose a learning-based approach to characterize the model difference, named the DELTA network, which complements the feature representation capability of the edge network in a compact form. To construct DELTA, we propose a sparsity optimization framework that extracts the essence of the base model to ensure compactness and sufficient feature representation capability of DELTA, and implement a negative correlation learning approach to ensure it complements the edge model. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation to test XDELTA's ability to explain model discrepancies, using over 1.2 million images and 24 models, and assessing real-world deployments with six participants. XDELTA excels in explaining differences between base and edge models (arbitrary pairs as well as compressed base models) through geometric and concept-level analysis, proving effective in real-world applications.

GenArtist: Multimodal LLM as an Agent for Unified Image Generation and Editing

Despite the success achieved by existing image generation and editing methods, current models still struggle with complex problems including intricate text prompts, and the absence of verification and self-correction mechanisms makes the generated images unreliable. Meanwhile, a single model tends to specialize in particular tasks and possess the corresponding capabilities, making it inadequate for fulfilling all user requirements. We propose GenArtist, a unified image generation and editing system, coordinated by a multimodal large language model (MLLM) agent. We integrate a comprehensive range of existing models into the tool library and utilize the agent for tool selection and execution. For a complex problem, the MLLM agent decomposes it into simpler sub-problems and constructs a tree structure to systematically plan the procedure of generation, editing, and self-correction with step-by-step verification. By automatically generating missing position-related inputs and incorporating position information, the appropriate tool can be effectively employed to address each sub-problem. Experiments demonstrate that GenArtist can perform various generation and editing tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance and surpassing existing models such as SDXL and DALL-E 3, as can be seen in Fig. 1. Project page is https://zhenyuw16.github.io/GenArtist_page.

Layered Image Vectorization via Semantic Simplification

This work presents a novel progressive image vectorization technique aimed at generating layered vectors that represent the original image from coarse to fine detail levels. Our approach introduces semantic simplification, which combines Score Distillation Sampling and semantic segmentation to iteratively simplify the input image. Subsequently, our method optimizes the vector layers for each of the progressively simplified images. Our method provides robust optimization, which avoids local minima and enables adjustable detail levels in the final output. The layered, compact vector representation enhances usability for further editing and modification. Comparative analysis with conventional vectorization methods demonstrates our technique's superiority in producing vectors with high visual fidelity, and more importantly, maintaining vector compactness and manageability. The project homepage is https://szuviz.github.io/layered_vectorization/.