MMTL-UniAD: A Unified Framework for Multimodal and Multi-Task Learning in Assistive Driving Perception

Advanced driver assistance systems require a comprehensive understanding of the driver's mental/physical state and traffic context but existing works often neglect the potential benefits of joint learning between these tasks. This paper proposes MMTL-UniAD, a unified multi-modal multi-task learning framework that simultaneously recognizes driver behavior (e.g., looking around, talking), driver emotion (e.g., anxiety, happiness), vehicle behavior (e.g., parking, turning), and traffic context (e.g., traffic jam, traffic smooth). A key challenge is avoiding negative transfer between tasks, which can impair learning performance. To address this, we introduce two key components into the framework: one is the multi-axis region attention network to extract global context-sensitive features, and the other is the dual-branch multimodal embedding to learn multimodal embeddings from both task-shared and task-specific features. The former uses a multi-attention mechanism to extract task-relevant features, mitigating negative transfer caused by task-unrelated features. The latter employs a dual-branch structure to adaptively adjust task-shared and task-specific parameters, enhancing cross-task knowledge transfer while reducing task conflicts. We assess MMTL-UniAD on the AIDE dataset, using a series of ablation studies, and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all four tasks. The code is available on https://github.com/Wenzhuo-Liu/MMTL-UniAD.

A Tutorial of Personalized Federated Recommender Systems: Recent Advances and Future Directions

Personalization stands as the cornerstone of recommender systems (RecSys), striving to sift out redundant information and offer tailor-made services for users. However, the conventional cloud-based RecSys necessitates centralized data collection, posing significant risks of user privacy breaches. In response to this challenge, federated recommender systems (FedRecSys) have emerged, garnering considerable attention. FedRecSys enable users to retain personal data locally and solely share model parameters with low privacy sensitivity for global model training, significantly bolstering the system's privacy protection capabilities. Within the distributed learning framework, the pronounced non-iid nature of user behavior data introduces fresh hurdles to federated optimization. Meanwhile, the ability of federated learning to concurrently learn multiple models presents an opportunity for personalized user modeling. Consequently, the development of personalized FedRecSys (PFedRecSys) is crucial and holds substantial significance. This tutorial seeks to provide an introduction to PFedRecSys, encompassing (1) an overview of existing studies on PFedRecSys, (2) a comprehensive taxonomy of PFedRecSys spanning four pivotal research directions-client-side adaptation, server-side aggregation, communication efficiency, privacy and protection, and (3) exploration of open challenges and promising future directions in PFedRecSys. This tutorial aims to establish a robust foundation and spark new perspectives for subsequent exploration and practical implementations in the evolving realm of RecSys.

MIPD: A Multi-sensory Interactive Perception Dataset for Embodied Intelligent Driving

During the process of driving, humans usually rely on multiple senses to gather information and make decisions. Analogously, in order to achieve embodied intelligence in autonomous driving, it is essential to integrate multidimensional sensory information in order to facilitate interaction with the environment. However, the current multi-modal fusion sensing schemes often neglect these additional sensory inputs, hindering the realization of fully autonomous driving. This paper considers multi-sensory information and proposes a multi-modal interactive perception dataset named MIPD, enabling expanding the current autonomous driving algorithm framework, for supporting the research on embodied intelligent driving. In addition to the conventional camera, lidar, and 4D radar data, our dataset incorporates multiple sensor inputs including sound, light intensity, vibration intensity and vehicle speed to enrich the dataset comprehensiveness. Comprising 126 consecutive sequences, many exceeding twenty seconds, MIPD features over 8,500 meticulously synchronized and annotated frames. Moreover, it encompasses many challenging scenarios, covering various road and lighting conditions. The dataset has undergone thorough experimental validation, producing valuable insights for the exploration of next-generation autonomous driving frameworks.

Personalized Item Representations in Federated Multimodal Recommendation

Federated recommendation systems are essential for providing personalized recommendations while protecting user privacy. However, current methods mainly rely on ID-based item embeddings, neglecting the rich multimodal information of items. To address this, we propose a Federated Multimodal Recommendation System, called FedMR. FedMR uses a foundation model on the server to encode multimodal item data, such as images and text. To handle data heterogeneity caused by user preference differences, FedMR introduces a Mixing Feature Fusion Module on each client, which adjusts fusion strategy weights based on user interaction history to generate personalized item representations that capture users' fine-grained preferences. FedMR is compatible with existing ID-based federated recommendation systems, improving performance without modifying the original framework. Experiments on four real-world multimodal datasets demonstrate FedMR's effectiveness. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FedMR.

Personalized Item Embeddings in Federated Multimodal Recommendation

Federated recommendation systems play a crucial role in protecting user privacy. However, existing methods primarily rely on ID-based item embeddings, overlooking the rich multimodal information of items. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Federated Multimodal Recommendation System called FedMR. FedMR leverages a foundation model on the server side to encode multimodal data, such as images and text, associated with items. To tackle the challenge of data heterogeneity caused by varying user preferences, FedMR introduces a Mixing Feature Fusion Module on the client. This module dynamically adjusts the weights of different fusion strategies based on user interaction history, generating personalized item embeddings that capture fine-grained user preferences. FedMR is compatible with existing ID-based federated recommendation systems, improving their performances without modifying the original framework. Our experiments on four real-world multimodal recommendation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of FedMR. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FedMR.

Personalized Federated Collaborative Filtering: A Variational AutoEncoder Approach

Federated Collaborative Filtering (FedCF) is an emerging field focused on developing a new recommendation framework with preserving privacy in a federated setting. Existing FedCF methods typically combine distributed Collaborative Filtering (CF) algorithms with privacy-preserving mechanisms, and then preserve personalized information into a user embedding vector. However, the user embedding is usually insufficient to preserve the rich information of the fine-grained personalization across heterogeneous clients. This paper proposes a novel personalized FedCF method by preserving users' personalized information into a latent variable and a neural model simultaneously. Specifically, we decompose the modeling of user knowledge into two encoders, each designed to capture shared knowledge and personalized knowledge separately. A personalized gating network is then applied to balance personalization and generalization between the global and local encoders. Moreover, to effectively train the proposed framework, we model the CF problem as a specialized Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) task by integrating user interaction vector reconstruction with missing value prediction. The decoder is trained to reconstruct the implicit feedback from items the user has interacted with, while also predicting items the user might be interested in but has not yet interacted with. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other baseline methods, showcasing superior performance.

Continuity Preserving Online CenterLine Graph Learning

Lane topology, which is usually modeled by a centerline graph, is essential for high-level autonomous driving. For a high-quality graph, both topology connectivity and spatial continuity of centerline segments are critical. However, most of existing approaches pay more attention to connectivity while neglect the continuity. Such kind of centerline graph usually cause problem to planning of autonomous driving. To overcome this problem, we present an end-to-end network, CGNet, with three key modules: 1)Junction Aware Query Enhancement module, which provides positional prior to accurately predict junction points; 2)B\'ezier Space Connection module, which enforces continuity constraints on any two topologically connected segments in a B\'ezier space; 3) Iterative Topology Refinement module, which is a graph-based network with memory to iteratively refine the predicted topological connectivity. CGNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on both nuScenes and Argoverse2 datasets.

Deriva-ML: A Continuous FAIRness Approach to Reproducible Machine Learning Models

Increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are used in eScience applications [9]. While these approaches have great potential, the literature has shown that ML-based approaches frequently suffer from results that are either incorrect or unreproducible due to mismanagement or misuse of data used for training and validating the models [12, 15]. Recognition of the necessity of high-quality data for correct ML results has led to data-centric ML approaches that shift the central focus from model development to creation of high-quality data sets to train and validate the models [14, 20]. However, there are limited tools and methods available for data-centric approaches to explore and evaluate ML solutions for eScience problems which often require collaborative multidisciplinary teams working with models and data that will rapidly evolve as an investigation unfolds [1]. In this paper, we show how data management tools based on the principle that all of the data for ML should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (i.e. FAIR [26]) can significantly improve the quality of data that is used for ML applications. When combined with best practices that apply these tools to the entire life cycle of an ML-based eScience investigation, we can significantly improve the ability of an eScience team to create correct and reproducible ML solutions. We propose an architecture and implementation of such tools and demonstrate through two use cases how they can be used to improve ML-based eScience investigations.

Unified End-to-End V2X Cooperative Autonomous Driving

V2X cooperation, through the integration of sensor data from both vehicles and infrastructure, is considered a pivotal approach to advancing autonomous driving technology. Current research primarily focuses on enhancing perception accuracy, often overlooking the systematic improvement of accident prediction accuracy through end-to-end learning, leading to insufficient attention to the safety issues of autonomous driving. To address this challenge, this paper introduces the UniE2EV2X framework, a V2X-integrated end-to-end autonomous driving system that consolidates key driving modules within a unified network. The framework employs a deformable attention-based data fusion strategy, effectively facilitating cooperation between vehicles and infrastructure. The main advantages include: 1) significantly enhancing agents' perception and motion prediction capabilities, thereby improving the accuracy of accident predictions; 2) ensuring high reliability in the data fusion process; 3) superior end-to-end perception compared to modular approaches. Furthermore, We implement the UniE2EV2X framework on the challenging DeepAccident, a simulation dataset designed for V2X cooperative driving.

Towards Scenario Generalization for Vision-based Roadside 3D Object Detection

Roadside perception can greatly increase the safety of autonomous vehicles by extending their perception ability beyond the visual range and addressing blind spots. However, current state-of-the-art vision-based roadside detection methods possess high accuracy on labeled scenes but have inferior performance on new scenes. This is because roadside cameras remain stationary after installation and can only collect data from a single scene, resulting in the algorithm overfitting these roadside backgrounds and camera poses. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose an innovative Scenario Generalization Framework for Vision-based Roadside 3D Object Detection, dubbed SGV3D. Specifically, we employ a Background-suppressed Module (BSM) to mitigate background overfitting in vision-centric pipelines by attenuating background features during the 2D to bird's-eye-view projection. Furthermore, by introducing the Semi-supervised Data Generation Pipeline (SSDG) using unlabeled images from new scenes, diverse instance foregrounds with varying camera poses are generated, addressing the risk of overfitting specific camera poses. We evaluate our method on two large-scale roadside benchmarks. Our method surpasses all previous methods by a significant margin in new scenes, including +42.57% for vehicle, +5.87% for pedestrian, and +14.89% for cyclist compared to BEVHeight on the DAIR-V2X-I heterologous benchmark. On the larger-scale Rope3D heterologous benchmark, we achieve notable gains of 14.48% for car and 12.41% for large vehicle. We aspire to contribute insights on the exploration of roadside perception techniques, emphasizing their capability for scenario generalization. The code will be available at {\url{ https://github.com/yanglei18/SGV3D}}