InstanceGaussian: Appearance-Semantic Joint Gaussian Representation for 3D Instance-Level Perception

3D scene understanding has become an essential area of research with applications in autonomous driving, robotics, and augmented reality. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful approach, combining explicit modeling with neural adaptability to provide efficient and detailed scene representations. However, three major challenges remain in leveraging 3DGS for scene understanding: 1) an imbalance between appearance and semantics, where dense Gaussian usage for fine-grained texture modeling does not align with the minimal requirements for semantic attributes; 2) inconsistencies between appearance and semantics, as purely appearance-based Gaussians often misrepresent object boundaries; and 3) reliance on top-down instance segmentation methods, which struggle with uneven category distributions, leading to over- or under-segmentation. In this work, we propose InstanceGaussian, a method that jointly learns appearance and semantic features while adaptively aggregating instances. Our contributions include: i) a novel Semantic-Scaffold-GS representation balancing appearance and semantics to improve feature representations and boundary delineation; ii) a progressive appearance-semantic joint training strategy to enhance stability and segmentation accuracy; and iii) a bottom-up, category-agnostic instance aggregation approach that addresses segmentation challenges through farthest point sampling and connected component analysis. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in category-agnostic, open-vocabulary 3D point-level segmentation, highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed representation and training strategies. Project page: https://lhj-git.github.io/InstanceGaussian/

S3-SLAM: Sparse Tri-plane Encoding for Neural Implicit SLAM

With the emergence of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), neural implicit representations have gained widespread applications across various domains, including simultaneous localization and mapping. However, current neural implicit SLAM faces a challenging trade-off problem between performance and the number of parameters. To address this problem, we propose sparse tri-plane encoding, which efficiently achieves scene reconstruction at resolutions up to 512 using only 2~4% of the commonly used tri-plane parameters (reduced from 100MB to 2~4MB). On this basis, we design S3-SLAM to achieve rapid and high-quality tracking and mapping through sparsifying plane parameters and integrating orthogonal features of tri-plane. Furthermore, we develop hierarchical bundle adjustment to achieve globally consistent geometric structures and reconstruct high-resolution appearance. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive tracking and scene reconstruction with minimal parameters on three datasets. Source code will soon be available.

GraphAD: Interaction Scene Graph for End-to-end Autonomous Driving

Modeling complicated interactions among the ego-vehicle, road agents, and map elements has been a crucial part for safety-critical autonomous driving. Previous works on end-to-end autonomous driving rely on the attention mechanism for handling heterogeneous interactions, which fails to capture the geometric priors and is also computationally intensive. In this paper, we propose the Interaction Scene Graph (ISG) as a unified method to model the interactions among the ego-vehicle, road agents, and map elements. With the representation of the ISG, the driving agents aggregate essential information from the most influential elements, including the road agents with potential collisions and the map elements to follow. Since a mass of unnecessary interactions are omitted, the more efficient scene-graph-based framework is able to focus on indispensable connections and leads to better performance. We evaluate the proposed method for end-to-end autonomous driving on the nuScenes dataset. Compared with strong baselines, our method significantly outperforms in the full-stack driving tasks, including perception, prediction, and planning. Code will be released at https://github.com/zhangyp15/GraphAD.

Adversarial Attacks on Cooperative Multi-agent Bandits

Cooperative multi-agent multi-armed bandits (CMA2B) consider the collaborative efforts of multiple agents in a shared multi-armed bandit game. We study latent vulnerabilities exposed by this collaboration and consider adversarial attacks on a few agents with the goal of influencing the decisions of the rest. More specifically, we study adversarial attacks on CMA2B in both homogeneous settings, where agents operate with the same arm set, and heterogeneous settings, where agents have distinct arm sets. In the homogeneous setting, we propose attack strategies that, by targeting just one agent, convince all agents to select a particular target arm $T-o(T)$ times while incurring $o(T)$ attack costs in $T$ rounds. In the heterogeneous setting, we prove that a target arm attack requires linear attack costs and propose attack strategies that can force a maximum number of agents to suffer linear regrets while incurring sublinear costs and only manipulating the observations of a few target agents. Numerical experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed attack strategies.

MARVEL: Multi-Agent Reinforcement-Learning for Large-Scale Variable Speed Limits

Variable speed limit (VSL) control is a promising traffic management strategy for enhancing safety and mobility. This work introduces MARVEL, a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework for implementing large-scale VSL control on freeway corridors using only commonly available data. The agents learn through a reward structure that incorporates adaptability to traffic conditions, safety, and mobility; enabling coordination among the agents. The proposed framework scales to cover corridors with many gantries thanks to a parameter sharing among all VSL agents. The agents are trained in a microsimulation environment based on a short freeway stretch with 8 gantries spanning 7 miles and tested with 34 gantries spanning 17 miles of I-24 near Nashville, TN. MARVEL improves traffic safety by 63.4% compared to the no control scenario and enhances traffic mobility by 14.6% compared to a state-of-the-practice algorithm that has been deployed on I-24. An explainability analysis is undertaken to explore the learned policy under different traffic conditions and the results provide insights into the decision-making process of agents. Finally, we test the policy learned from the simulation-based experiments on real input data from I-24 to illustrate the potential deployment capability of the learned policy.

Adversarial Attacks on Online Learning to Rank with Click Feedback

Online learning to rank (OLTR) is a sequential decision-making problem where a learning agent selects an ordered list of items and receives feedback through user clicks. Although potential attacks against OLTR algorithms may cause serious losses in real-world applications, little is known about adversarial attacks on OLTR. This paper studies attack strategies against multiple variants of OLTR. Our first result provides an attack strategy against the UCB algorithm on classical stochastic bandits with binary feedback, which solves the key issues caused by bounded and discrete feedback that previous works can not handle. Building on this result, we design attack algorithms against UCB-based OLTR algorithms in position-based and cascade models. Finally, we propose a general attack strategy against any algorithm under the general click model. Each attack algorithm manipulates the learning agent into choosing the target attack item $T-o(T)$ times, incurring a cumulative cost of $o(T)$. Experiments on synthetic and real data further validate the effectiveness of our proposed attack algorithms.

Contextual Information and Commonsense Based Prompt for Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims to detect the emotion for each utterance in a given conversation. The newly proposed ERC models have leveraged pre-trained language models (PLMs) with the paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning to obtain good performance. However, these models seldom exploit PLMs' advantages thoroughly, and perform poorly for the conversations lacking explicit emotional expressions. In order to fully leverage the latent knowledge related to the emotional expressions in utterances, we propose a novel ERC model CISPER with the new paradigm of prompt and language model (LM) tuning. Specifically, CISPER is equipped with the prompt blending the contextual information and commonsense related to the interlocutor's utterances, to achieve ERC more effectively. Our extensive experiments demonstrate CISPER's superior performance over the state-of-the-art ERC models, and the effectiveness of leveraging these two kinds of significant prompt information for performance gains. To reproduce our experimental results conveniently, CISPER's sourcecode and the datasets have been shared at https://github.com/DeqingYang/CISPER.