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Oct 8

End-to-End Multi-Person Pose Estimation with Pose-Aware Video Transformer

Existing multi-person video pose estimation methods typically adopt a two-stage pipeline: detecting individuals in each frame, followed by temporal modeling for single-person pose estimation. This design relies on heuristic operations such as detection, RoI cropping, and non-maximum suppression (NMS), limiting both accuracy and efficiency. In this paper, we present a fully end-to-end framework for multi-person 2D pose estimation in videos, effectively eliminating heuristic operations. A key challenge is to associate individuals across frames under complex and overlapping temporal trajectories. To address this, we introduce a novel Pose-Aware Video transformEr Network (PAVE-Net), which features a spatial encoder to model intra-frame relations and a spatiotemporal pose decoder to capture global dependencies across frames. To achieve accurate temporal association, we propose a pose-aware attention mechanism that enables each pose query to selectively aggregate features corresponding to the same individual across consecutive frames.Additionally, we explicitly model spatiotemporal dependencies among pose keypoints to improve accuracy. Notably, our approach is the first end-to-end method for multi-frame 2D human pose estimation.Extensive experiments show that PAVE-Net substantially outperforms prior image-based end-to-end methods, achieving a 6.0 mAP improvement on PoseTrack2017, and delivers accuracy competitive with state-of-the-art two-stage video-based approaches, while offering significant gains in efficiency.Project page: https://github.com/zgspose/PAVENet

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 17, 2025

Visual Information Extraction in the Wild: Practical Dataset and End-to-end Solution

Visual information extraction (VIE), which aims to simultaneously perform OCR and information extraction in a unified framework, has drawn increasing attention due to its essential role in various applications like understanding receipts, goods, and traffic signs. However, as existing benchmark datasets for VIE mainly consist of document images without the adequate diversity of layout structures, background disturbs, and entity categories, they cannot fully reveal the challenges of real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a large-scale dataset consisting of camera images for VIE, which contains not only the larger variance of layout, backgrounds, and fonts but also much more types of entities. Besides, we propose a novel framework for end-to-end VIE that combines the stages of OCR and information extraction in an end-to-end learning fashion. Different from the previous end-to-end approaches that directly adopt OCR features as the input of an information extraction module, we propose to use contrastive learning to narrow the semantic gap caused by the difference between the tasks of OCR and information extraction. We evaluate the existing end-to-end methods for VIE on the proposed dataset and observe that the performance of these methods has a distinguishable drop from SROIE (a widely used English dataset) to our proposed dataset due to the larger variance of layout and entities. These results demonstrate our dataset is more practical for promoting advanced VIE algorithms. In addition, experiments demonstrate that the proposed VIE method consistently achieves the obvious performance gains on the proposed and SROIE datasets.

  • 7 authors
·
May 12, 2023

UncAD: Towards Safe End-to-end Autonomous Driving via Online Map Uncertainty

End-to-end autonomous driving aims to produce planning trajectories from raw sensors directly. Currently, most approaches integrate perception, prediction, and planning modules into a fully differentiable network, promising great scalability. However, these methods typically rely on deterministic modeling of online maps in the perception module for guiding or constraining vehicle planning, which may incorporate erroneous perception information and further compromise planning safety. To address this issue, we delve into the importance of online map uncertainty for enhancing autonomous driving safety and propose a novel paradigm named UncAD. Specifically, UncAD first estimates the uncertainty of the online map in the perception module. It then leverages the uncertainty to guide motion prediction and planning modules to produce multi-modal trajectories. Finally, to achieve safer autonomous driving, UncAD proposes an uncertainty-collision-aware planning selection strategy according to the online map uncertainty to evaluate and select the best trajectory. In this study, we incorporate UncAD into various state-of-the-art (SOTA) end-to-end methods. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset show that integrating UncAD, with only a 1.9% increase in parameters, can reduce collision rates by up to 26% and drivable area conflict rate by up to 42%. Codes, pre-trained models, and demo videos can be accessed at https://github.com/pengxuanyang/UncAD.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 17, 2025

Zero-Effort Image-to-Music Generation: An Interpretable RAG-based VLM Approach

Recently, Image-to-Music (I2M) generation has garnered significant attention, with potential applications in fields such as gaming, advertising, and multi-modal art creation. However, due to the ambiguous and subjective nature of I2M tasks, most end-to-end methods lack interpretability, leaving users puzzled about the generation results. Even methods based on emotion mapping face controversy, as emotion represents only a singular aspect of art. Additionally, most learning-based methods require substantial computational resources and large datasets for training, hindering accessibility for common users. To address these challenges, we propose the first Vision Language Model (VLM)-based I2M framework that offers high interpretability and low computational cost. Specifically, we utilize ABC notation to bridge the text and music modalities, enabling the VLM to generate music using natural language. We then apply multi-modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and self-refinement techniques to allow the VLM to produce high-quality music without external training. Furthermore, we leverage the generated motivations in text and the attention maps from the VLM to provide explanations for the generated results in both text and image modalities. To validate our method, we conduct both human studies and machine evaluations, where our method outperforms others in terms of music quality and music-image consistency, indicating promising results. Our code is available at https://github.com/RS2002/Image2Music .

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 26, 2025

Self-Improvement Programming for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (TKGQA) aims to answer questions with temporal intent over Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs). The core challenge of this task lies in understanding the complex semantic information regarding multiple types of time constraints (e.g., before, first) in questions. Existing end-to-end methods implicitly model the time constraints by learning time-aware embeddings of questions and candidate answers, which is far from understanding the question comprehensively. Motivated by semantic-parsing-based approaches that explicitly model constraints in questions by generating logical forms with symbolic operators, we design fundamental temporal operators for time constraints and introduce a novel self-improvement Programming method for TKGQA (Prog-TQA). Specifically, Prog-TQA leverages the in-context learning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to understand the combinatory time constraints in the questions and generate corresponding program drafts with a few examples given. Then, it aligns these drafts to TKGs with the linking module and subsequently executes them to generate the answers. To enhance the ability to understand questions, Prog-TQA is further equipped with a self-improvement strategy to effectively bootstrap LLMs using high-quality self-generated drafts. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed Prog-TQA on MultiTQ and CronQuestions datasets, especially in the Hits@1 metric.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 2, 2024

WavThruVec: Latent speech representation as intermediate features for neural speech synthesis

Recent advances in neural text-to-speech research have been dominated by two-stage pipelines utilizing low-level intermediate speech representation such as mel-spectrograms. However, such predetermined features are fundamentally limited, because they do not allow to exploit the full potential of a data-driven approach through learning hidden representations. For this reason, several end-to-end methods have been proposed. However, such models are harder to train and require a large number of high-quality recordings with transcriptions. Here, we propose WavThruVec - a two-stage architecture that resolves the bottleneck by using high-dimensional Wav2Vec 2.0 embeddings as intermediate speech representation. Since these hidden activations provide high-level linguistic features, they are more robust to noise. That allows us to utilize annotated speech datasets of a lower quality to train the first-stage module. At the same time, the second-stage component can be trained on large-scale untranscribed audio corpora, as Wav2Vec 2.0 embeddings are already time-aligned. This results in an increased generalization capability to out-of-vocabulary words, as well as to a better generalization to unseen speakers. We show that the proposed model not only matches the quality of state-of-the-art neural models, but also presents useful properties enabling tasks like voice conversion or zero-shot synthesis.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 31, 2022

Señorita-2M: A High-Quality Instruction-based Dataset for General Video Editing by Video Specialists

Recent advancements in video generation have spurred the development of video editing techniques, which can be divided into inversion-based and end-to-end methods. However, current video editing methods still suffer from several challenges. Inversion-based methods, though training-free and flexible, are time-consuming during inference, struggle with fine-grained editing instructions, and produce artifacts and jitter. On the other hand, end-to-end methods, which rely on edited video pairs for training, offer faster inference speeds but often produce poor editing results due to a lack of high-quality training video pairs. In this paper, to close the gap in end-to-end methods, we introduce Se\~norita-2M, a high-quality video editing dataset. Se\~norita-2M consists of approximately 2 millions of video editing pairs. It is built by crafting four high-quality, specialized video editing models, each crafted and trained by our team to achieve state-of-the-art editing results. We also propose a filtering pipeline to eliminate poorly edited video pairs. Furthermore, we explore common video editing architectures to identify the most effective structure based on current pre-trained generative model. Extensive experiments show that our dataset can help to yield remarkably high-quality video editing results. More details are available at https://senorita.github.io.

  • 10 authors
·
Feb 10, 2025

DreamVVT: Mastering Realistic Video Virtual Try-On in the Wild via a Stage-Wise Diffusion Transformer Framework

Video virtual try-on (VVT) technology has garnered considerable academic interest owing to its promising applications in e-commerce advertising and entertainment. However, most existing end-to-end methods rely heavily on scarce paired garment-centric datasets and fail to effectively leverage priors of advanced visual models and test-time inputs, making it challenging to accurately preserve fine-grained garment details and maintain temporal consistency in unconstrained scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose DreamVVT, a carefully designed two-stage framework built upon Diffusion Transformers (DiTs), which is inherently capable of leveraging diverse unpaired human-centric data to enhance adaptability in real-world scenarios. To further leverage prior knowledge from pretrained models and test-time inputs, in the first stage, we sample representative frames from the input video and utilize a multi-frame try-on model integrated with a vision-language model (VLM), to synthesize high-fidelity and semantically consistent keyframe try-on images. These images serve as complementary appearance guidance for subsequent video generation. In the second stage, skeleton maps together with fine-grained motion and appearance descriptions are extracted from the input content, and these along with the keyframe try-on images are then fed into a pretrained video generation model enhanced with LoRA adapters. This ensures long-term temporal coherence for unseen regions and enables highly plausible dynamic motions. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that DreamVVT surpasses existing methods in preserving detailed garment content and temporal stability in real-world scenarios. Our project page https://virtu-lab.github.io/

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 4, 2025 2

Wavelet Policy: Imitation Policy Learning in Frequency Domain with Wavelet Transforms

Recent imitation learning policies, often framed as time series prediction tasks, directly map robotic observations-such as high-dimensional visual data and proprioception-into the action space. While time series prediction primarily relies on spatial domain modeling, the underutilization of frequency domain analysis in robotic manipulation trajectory prediction may lead to neglecting the inherent temporal information embedded within action sequences. To address this, we reframe imitation learning policies through the lens of the frequency domain and introduce the Wavelet Policy. This novel approach employs wavelet transforms (WT) for feature preprocessing and extracts multi-scale features from the frequency domain using the SE2MD (Single Encoder to Multiple Decoder) architecture. Furthermore, to enhance feature mapping in the frequency domain and increase model capacity, we introduce a Learnable Frequency-Domain Filter (LFDF) after each frequency decoder, improving adaptability under different visual conditions. Our results show that the Wavelet Policy outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) end-to-end methods by over 10% on four challenging robotic arm tasks, while maintaining a comparable parameter count. In long-range settings, its performance declines more slowly as task volume increases. The source code is available at https://github.com/lurenjia384/Wavelet_Policy.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 7, 2025

Visual Merit or Linguistic Crutch? A Close Look at DeepSeek-OCR

DeepSeek-OCR utilizes an optical 2D mapping approach to achieve high-ratio vision-text compression, claiming to decode text tokens exceeding ten times the input visual tokens. While this suggests a promising solution for the LLM long-context bottleneck, we investigate a critical question: "Visual merit or linguistic crutch - which drives DeepSeek-OCR's performance?" By employing sentence-level and word-level semantic corruption, we isolate the model's intrinsic OCR capabilities from its language priors. Results demonstrate that without linguistic support, DeepSeek-OCR's performance plummets from approximately 90% to 20%. Comparative benchmarking against 13 baseline models reveals that traditional pipeline OCR methods exhibit significantly higher robustness to such semantic perturbations than end-to-end methods. Furthermore, we find that lower visual token counts correlate with increased reliance on priors, exacerbating hallucination risks. Context stress testing also reveals a total model collapse around 10,000 text tokens, suggesting that current optical compression techniques may paradoxically aggravate the long-context bottleneck. This study empirically defines DeepSeek-OCR's capability boundaries and offers essential insights for future optimizations of the vision-text compression paradigm. We release all data, results and scripts used in this study at https://github.com/dududuck00/DeepSeekOCR.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 7

Met$^2$Net: A Decoupled Two-Stage Spatio-Temporal Forecasting Model for Complex Meteorological Systems

The increasing frequency of extreme weather events due to global climate change urges accurate weather prediction. Recently, great advances have been made by the end-to-end methods, thanks to deep learning techniques, but they face limitations of representation inconsistency in multivariable integration and struggle to effectively capture the dependency between variables, which is required in complex weather systems. Treating different variables as distinct modalities and applying a two-stage training approach from multimodal models can partially alleviate this issue, but due to the inconformity in training tasks between the two stages, the results are often suboptimal. To address these challenges, we propose an implicit two-stage training method, configuring separate encoders and decoders for each variable. In detailed, in the first stage, the Translator is frozen while the Encoders and Decoders learn a shared latent space, in the second stage, the Encoders and Decoders are frozen, and the Translator captures inter-variable interactions for prediction. Besides, by introducing a self-attention mechanism for multivariable fusion in the latent space, the performance achieves further improvements. Empirically, extensive experiments show the state-of-the-art performance of our method. Specifically, it reduces the MSE for near-surface air temperature and relative humidity predictions by 28.82\% and 23.39\%, respectively. The source code is available at https://github.com/ShremG/Met2Net.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 23, 2025 1

Efficient Heterogeneous Graph Learning via Random Projection

Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) are powerful tools for deep learning on heterogeneous graphs. Typical HGNNs require repetitive message passing during training, limiting efficiency for large-scale real-world graphs. Recent pre-computation-based HGNNs use one-time message passing to transform a heterogeneous graph into regular-shaped tensors, enabling efficient mini-batch training. Existing pre-computation-based HGNNs can be mainly categorized into two styles, which differ in how much information loss is allowed and efficiency. We propose a hybrid pre-computation-based HGNN, named Random Projection Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (RpHGNN), which combines the benefits of one style's efficiency with the low information loss of the other style. To achieve efficiency, the main framework of RpHGNN consists of propagate-then-update iterations, where we introduce a Random Projection Squashing step to ensure that complexity increases only linearly. To achieve low information loss, we introduce a Relation-wise Neighbor Collection component with an Even-odd Propagation Scheme, which aims to collect information from neighbors in a finer-grained way. Experimental results indicate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on seven small and large benchmark datasets while also being 230% faster compared to the most effective baseline. Surprisingly, our approach not only surpasses pre-processing-based baselines but also outperforms end-to-end methods.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 22, 2023

OmniDocBench: Benchmarking Diverse PDF Document Parsing with Comprehensive Annotations

Document content extraction is crucial in computer vision, especially for meeting the high-quality data needs of large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technologies. However, current document parsing methods suffer from significant limitations in terms of diversity and comprehensive evaluation. To address these challenges, we introduce OmniDocBench, a novel multi-source benchmark designed to advance automated document content extraction. OmniDocBench includes a meticulously curated and annotated high-quality evaluation dataset comprising nine diverse document types, such as academic papers, textbooks, slides, among others. Our benchmark provides a flexible and comprehensive evaluation framework with 19 layout category labels and 14 attribute labels, enabling multi-level assessments across entire datasets, individual modules, or specific data types. Using OmniDocBench, we perform an exhaustive comparative analysis of existing modular pipelines and multimodal end-to-end methods, highlighting their limitations in handling document diversity and ensuring fair evaluation. OmniDocBench establishes a robust, diverse, and fair evaluation standard for the document content extraction field, offering crucial insights for future advancements and fostering the development of document parsing technologies. The codes and dataset is available in https://github.com/opendatalab/OmniDocBench.

  • 20 authors
·
Dec 10, 2024 4

Learning Association via Track-Detection Matching for Multi-Object Tracking

Multi-object tracking aims to maintain object identities over time by associating detections across video frames. Two dominant paradigms exist in literature: tracking-by-detection methods, which are computationally efficient but rely on handcrafted association heuristics, and end-to-end approaches, which learn association from data at the cost of higher computational complexity. We propose Track-Detection Link Prediction (TDLP), a tracking-by-detection method that performs per-frame association via link prediction between tracks and detections, i.e., by predicting the correct continuation of each track at every frame. TDLP is architecturally designed primarily for geometric features such as bounding boxes, while optionally incorporating additional cues, including pose and appearance. Unlike heuristic-based methods, TDLP learns association directly from data without handcrafted rules, while remaining modular and computationally efficient compared to end-to-end trackers. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that TDLP consistently surpasses state-of-the-art performance across both tracking-by-detection and end-to-end methods. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis comparing link prediction with metric learning-based association and show that link prediction is more effective, particularly when handling heterogeneous features such as detection bounding boxes. Our code is available at https://github.com/Robotmurlock/TDLP{https://github.com/Robotmurlock/TDLP}.

  • 1 authors
·
Dec 26, 2025

InstructSAM: Segment Any Instance with Any Instructions

In this paper, we introduce InstructSAM, a unified and streamlined framework designed for multi-instance segmentation under arbitrary instructions. We formulates instruction-driven instance segmentation as a set-structured query prediction problem and propose an explicit reasoning-to-instance query interface that elegantly bridges a vision-language model (VLM) and SAM3. Specifically, a bank of learnable instance queries is injected into the VLM and contextualized with instruction and visual information, enabling each query to serve as an instance-aware slot. A hybrid-attention mechanism further promotes interaction among these queries, visual tokens, and instruction tokens, improving instance enumeration and reducing duplicate predictions. The resulting LLM-conditioned queries are projected into SAM3's detector query space to drive accurate multi-instance segmentation in a single forward pass. This design equips SAM3 with high-level instruction understanding, compositional reasoning, and instance-level set prediction without modifying its core architecture. To support training and evaluation, we further construct Inst2Seg, a high-quality and large-scale instruction-based instance segmentation dataset and benchmark that couples free-form instructions with instance-level masks. Extensive experiments show that only 2B-scale InstructSAM achieves strong results across complex instruction-driven and phrase-level referring segmentation benchmarks, outperforming prior end-to-end methods and SAM3's agentic pipeline while enabling efficient single-pass multi-instance prediction.

  • 9 authors
·
May 24 3

Beyond the Survey: A Systematic Empirical Study of Detection and Association in Visual MOT

This paper presents a comprehensive experimental evaluation and detailed analysis of state-of-the-art multi-object tracking algorithms, with an emphasis on quantifying the individual contributions of detection and association components to overall tracking performance. Unlike existing surveys that primarily offer theoretical categorizations or taxonomies of tracking methods, our work adopts a rigorous experimental perspective grounded in publicly available implementations, providing practical guidance for researchers and practitioners in method selection and system design. We introduce a unified pipeline diagram that consolidates the core components across the two main branches of visual multi-object tracking: tracking-by-detection and end-to-end deep learning paradigms, and systematically analyze the object detection, feature extraction, and data association modules. Through extensive empirical studies on standard benchmarks, including MOT16, MOT17, MOT20, SportsMOT, DanceTrack, and CrowdTrack datasets, we reveal critical insights: (1) detection quality dominates association strategy performance, with detector improvements yielding more than 10% gains compared to less than 5% from refined association strategies; (2) modern deep learning detectors paired with specialized re-identification models significantly outperform joint detection and embedding approaches; and (3) transformer-based end-to-end methods exhibit greater robustness to detection quality variations but at a substantial computational cost. Our findings from extensive experiments provide key insights into component-level effects in MOT, particularly the dominant influence of detection quality relative to association, while offering practical insights for designing and optimizing MOT systems under varying performance and robustness requirements. Code and experimental setups are available at github.com/linh-gist/VisualMOT.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 13

LoGoPlanner: Localization Grounded Navigation Policy with Metric-aware Visual Geometry

Trajectory planning in unstructured environments is a fundamental and challenging capability for mobile robots. Traditional modular pipelines suffer from latency and cascading errors across perception, localization, mapping, and planning modules. Recent end-to-end learning methods map raw visual observations directly to control signals or trajectories, promising greater performance and efficiency in open-world settings. However, most prior end-to-end approaches still rely on separate localization modules that depend on accurate sensor extrinsic calibration for self-state estimation, thereby limiting generalization across embodiments and environments. We introduce LoGoPlanner, a localization-grounded, end-to-end navigation framework that addresses these limitations by: (1) finetuning a long-horizon visual-geometry backbone to ground predictions with absolute metric scale, thereby providing implicit state estimation for accurate localization; (2) reconstructing surrounding scene geometry from historical observations to supply dense, fine-grained environmental awareness for reliable obstacle avoidance; and (3) conditioning the policy on implicit geometry bootstrapped by the aforementioned auxiliary tasks, thereby reducing error propagation.We evaluate LoGoPlanner in both simulation and real-world settings, where its fully end-to-end design reduces cumulative error while metric-aware geometry memory enhances planning consistency and obstacle avoidance, leading to more than a 27.3\% improvement over oracle-localization baselines and strong generalization across embodiments and environments. The code and models have been made publicly available on the https://steinate.github.io/logoplanner.github.io/{project page}.

InternRobotics Intern Robotics
·
Dec 22, 2025 2

Mask TextSpotter v3: Segmentation Proposal Network for Robust Scene Text Spotting

Recent end-to-end trainable methods for scene text spotting, integrating detection and recognition, showed much progress. However, most of the current arbitrary-shape scene text spotters use region proposal networks (RPN) to produce proposals. RPN relies heavily on manually designed anchors and its proposals are represented with axis-aligned rectangles. The former presents difficulties in handling text instances of extreme aspect ratios or irregular shapes, and the latter often includes multiple neighboring instances into a single proposal, in cases of densely oriented text. To tackle these problems, we propose Mask TextSpotter v3, an end-to-end trainable scene text spotter that adopts a Segmentation Proposal Network (SPN) instead of an RPN. Our SPN is anchor-free and gives accurate representations of arbitrary-shape proposals. It is therefore superior to RPN in detecting text instances of extreme aspect ratios or irregular shapes. Furthermore, the accurate proposals produced by SPN allow masked RoI features to be used for decoupling neighboring text instances. As a result, our Mask TextSpotter v3 can handle text instances of extreme aspect ratios or irregular shapes, and its recognition accuracy won't be affected by nearby text or background noise. Specifically, we outperform state-of-the-art methods by 21.9 percent on the Rotated ICDAR 2013 dataset (rotation robustness), 5.9 percent on the Total-Text dataset (shape robustness), and achieve state-of-the-art performance on the MSRA-TD500 dataset (aspect ratio robustness). Code is available at: https://github.com/MhLiao/MaskTextSpotterV3

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 18, 2020

LifelongMemory: Leveraging LLMs for Answering Queries in Egocentric Videos

The egocentric video natural language query (NLQ) task involves localizing a temporal window in an egocentric video that provides an answer to a posed query, which has wide applications in building personalized AI assistants. Prior methods for this task have focused on improvements of network architecture and leveraging pre-training for enhanced image and video features, but have struggled with capturing long-range temporal dependencies in lengthy videos, and cumbersome end-to-end training. Motivated by recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and vision language models, we introduce LifelongMemory, a novel framework that utilizes multiple pre-trained models to answer queries from extensive egocentric video content. We address the unique challenge by employing a pre-trained captioning model to create detailed narratives of the videos. These narratives are then used to prompt a frozen LLM to generate coarse-grained temporal window predictions, which are subsequently refined using a pre-trained NLQ model. Empirical results demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance against existing supervised end-to-end learning methods, underlining the potential of integrating multiple pre-trained multimodal large language models in complex vision-language tasks. We provide a comprehensive analysis of key design decisions and hyperparameters in our pipeline, offering insights and practical guidelines.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 7, 2023

VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving requires a comprehensive understanding of the surrounding environment for reliable trajectory planning. Previous works rely on dense rasterized scene representation (e.g., agent occupancy and semantic map) to perform planning, which is computationally intensive and misses the instance-level structure information. In this paper, we propose VAD, an end-to-end vectorized paradigm for autonomous driving, which models the driving scene as a fully vectorized representation. The proposed vectorized paradigm has two significant advantages. On one hand, VAD exploits the vectorized agent motion and map elements as explicit instance-level planning constraints which effectively improves planning safety. On the other hand, VAD runs much faster than previous end-to-end planning methods by getting rid of computation-intensive rasterized representation and hand-designed post-processing steps. VAD achieves state-of-the-art end-to-end planning performance on the nuScenes dataset, outperforming the previous best method by a large margin. Our base model, VAD-Base, greatly reduces the average collision rate by 29.0% and runs 2.5x faster. Besides, a lightweight variant, VAD-Tiny, greatly improves the inference speed (up to 9.3x) while achieving comparable planning performance. We believe the excellent performance and the high efficiency of VAD are critical for the real-world deployment of an autonomous driving system. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hustvl/VAD for facilitating future research.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 21, 2023

Beyond ViT Tokens: Masked-Diffusion Pretrained Convolutional Pathology Foundation Model for Cell-Level Dense Prediction

Cell-level dense prediction is central to computational pathology, but remains challenging due to fine-grained histological structures, strong domain shifts, and costly dense annotations. Existing ViT-based pathology foundation models rely on patch tokenization, which can disrupt spatial continuity and weaken local morphological details needed for cell-level prediction. To address this, we propose Masked-Diffusion Convolutional Foundation Models, termed ConvNeXt Masked-Diffusion (CMD), a self-supervised convolutional generative pretraining framework for dense pathology representation learning. CMD uses a fully convolutional ConvNeXt-UNet backbone, performs masked-diffusion pretraining in pixel space, and incorporates frozen pathology foundation model features through adaptive normalization. Experimental results demonstrate that CMD consistently outperforms existing ViT-based pathology foundation models and even surpasses state-of-the-art end-to-end segmentation methods while fine-tuning only a small number of task-specific parameters across multiple pathology dense prediction tasks. The advantage is particularly pronounced under limited annotation settings, where CMD exhibits stronger robustness and generalization ability. Our findings suggest that purely convolutional architectures can also serve as competitive pathology foundation models for cell-level dense prediction, achieving leading performance within the current ViT-dominated paradigm and providing a scalable, high-performance solution that better preserves histological structural priors for fine-grained pathology understanding.

  • 8 authors
·
May 7

VAMOS: A Hierarchical Vision-Language-Action Model for Capability-Modulated and Steerable Navigation

A fundamental challenge in robot navigation lies in learning policies that generalize across diverse environments while conforming to the unique physical constraints and capabilities of a specific embodiment (e.g., quadrupeds can walk up stairs, but rovers cannot). We propose VAMOS, a hierarchical VLA that decouples semantic planning from embodiment grounding: a generalist planner learns from diverse, open-world data, while a specialist affordance model learns the robot's physical constraints and capabilities in safe, low-cost simulation. We enabled this separation by carefully designing an interface that lets a high-level planner propose candidate paths directly in image space that the affordance model then evaluates and re-ranks. Our real-world experiments show that VAMOS achieves higher success rates in both indoor and complex outdoor navigation than state-of-the-art model-based and end-to-end learning methods. We also show that our hierarchical design enables cross-embodied navigation across legged and wheeled robots and is easily steerable using natural language. Real-world ablations confirm that the specialist model is key to embodiment grounding, enabling a single high-level planner to be deployed across physically distinct wheeled and legged robots. Finally, this model significantly enhances single-robot reliability, achieving 3X higher success rates by rejecting physically infeasible plans. Website: https://vamos-vla.github.io/

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 23, 2025

Collision Avoidance and Navigation for a Quadrotor Swarm Using End-to-end Deep Reinforcement Learning

End-to-end deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for quadrotor control promises many benefits -- easy deployment, task generalization and real-time execution capability. Prior end-to-end DRL-based methods have showcased the ability to deploy learned controllers onto single quadrotors or quadrotor teams maneuvering in simple, obstacle-free environments. However, the addition of obstacles increases the number of possible interactions exponentially, thereby increasing the difficulty of training RL policies. In this work, we propose an end-to-end DRL approach to control quadrotor swarms in environments with obstacles. We provide our agents a curriculum and a replay buffer of the clipped collision episodes to improve performance in obstacle-rich environments. We implement an attention mechanism to attend to the neighbor robots and obstacle interactions - the first successful demonstration of this mechanism on policies for swarm behavior deployed on severely compute-constrained hardware. Our work is the first work that demonstrates the possibility of learning neighbor-avoiding and obstacle-avoiding control policies trained with end-to-end DRL that transfers zero-shot to real quadrotors. Our approach scales to 32 robots with 80% obstacle density in simulation and 8 robots with 20% obstacle density in physical deployment. Video demonstrations are available on the project website at: https://sites.google.com/view/obst-avoid-swarm-rl.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 23, 2023

GenAD: Generative End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Directly producing planning results from raw sensors has been a long-desired solution for autonomous driving and has attracted increasing attention recently. Most existing end-to-end autonomous driving methods factorize this problem into perception, motion prediction, and planning. However, we argue that the conventional progressive pipeline still cannot comprehensively model the entire traffic evolution process, e.g., the future interaction between the ego car and other traffic participants and the structural trajectory prior. In this paper, we explore a new paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving, where the key is to predict how the ego car and the surroundings evolve given past scenes. We propose GenAD, a generative framework that casts autonomous driving into a generative modeling problem. We propose an instance-centric scene tokenizer that first transforms the surrounding scenes into map-aware instance tokens. We then employ a variational autoencoder to learn the future trajectory distribution in a structural latent space for trajectory prior modeling. We further adopt a temporal model to capture the agent and ego movements in the latent space to generate more effective future trajectories. GenAD finally simultaneously performs motion prediction and planning by sampling distributions in the learned structural latent space conditioned on the instance tokens and using the learned temporal model to generate futures. Extensive experiments on the widely used nuScenes benchmark show that the proposed GenAD achieves state-of-the-art performance on vision-centric end-to-end autonomous driving with high efficiency. Code: https://github.com/wzzheng/GenAD.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 18, 2024

PlacidDreamer: Advancing Harmony in Text-to-3D Generation

Recently, text-to-3D generation has attracted significant attention, resulting in notable performance enhancements. Previous methods utilize end-to-end 3D generation models to initialize 3D Gaussians, multi-view diffusion models to enforce multi-view consistency, and text-to-image diffusion models to refine details with score distillation algorithms. However, these methods exhibit two limitations. Firstly, they encounter conflicts in generation directions since different models aim to produce diverse 3D assets. Secondly, the issue of over-saturation in score distillation has not been thoroughly investigated and solved. To address these limitations, we propose PlacidDreamer, a text-to-3D framework that harmonizes initialization, multi-view generation, and text-conditioned generation with a single multi-view diffusion model, while simultaneously employing a novel score distillation algorithm to achieve balanced saturation. To unify the generation direction, we introduce the Latent-Plane module, a training-friendly plug-in extension that enables multi-view diffusion models to provide fast geometry reconstruction for initialization and enhanced multi-view images to personalize the text-to-image diffusion model. To address the over-saturation problem, we propose to view score distillation as a multi-objective optimization problem and introduce the Balanced Score Distillation algorithm, which offers a Pareto Optimal solution that achieves both rich details and balanced saturation. Extensive experiments validate the outstanding capabilities of our PlacidDreamer. The code is available at https://github.com/HansenHuang0823/PlacidDreamer.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 18, 2024 2

SpaceDrive: Infusing Spatial Awareness into VLM-based Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving methods built on vision language models (VLMs) have undergone rapid development driven by their universal visual understanding and strong reasoning capabilities obtained from the large-scale pretraining. However, we find that current VLMs struggle to understand fine-grained 3D spatial relationships which is a fundamental requirement for systems interacting with the physical world. To address this issue, we propose SpaceDrive, a spatial-aware VLM-based driving framework that treats spatial information as explicit positional encodings (PEs) instead of textual digit tokens, enabling joint reasoning over semantic and spatial representations. SpaceDrive employs a universal positional encoder to all 3D coordinates derived from multi-view depth estimation, historical ego-states, and text prompts. These 3D PEs are first superimposed to augment the corresponding 2D visual tokens. Meanwhile, they serve as a task-agnostic coordinate representation, replacing the digit-wise numerical tokens as both inputs and outputs for the VLM. This mechanism enables the model to better index specific visual semantics in spatial reasoning and directly regress trajectory coordinates rather than generating digit-by-digit, thereby enhancing planning accuracy. Extensive experiments validate that SpaceDrive achieves state-of-the-art open-loop performance on the nuScenes dataset and the second-best Driving Score of 78.02 on the Bench2Drive closed-loop benchmark over existing VLM-based methods.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 11, 2025

Breaking Imitation Bottlenecks: Reinforced Diffusion Powers Diverse Trajectory Generation

Most end-to-end autonomous driving methods rely on imitation learning from single expert demonstrations, often leading to conservative and homogeneous behaviors that limit generalization in complex real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose DIVER, an end-to-end driving framework that integrates reinforcement learning with diffusion-based generation to produce diverse and feasible trajectories. At the core of DIVER lies a reinforced diffusion-based generation mechanism. First, the model conditions on map elements and surrounding agents to generate multiple reference trajectories from a single ground-truth trajectory, alleviating the limitations of imitation learning that arise from relying solely on single expert demonstrations. Second, reinforcement learning is employed to guide the diffusion process, where reward-based supervision enforces safety and diversity constraints on the generated trajectories, thereby enhancing their practicality and generalization capability. Furthermore, to address the limitations of L2-based open-loop metrics in capturing trajectory diversity, we propose a novel Diversity metric to evaluate the diversity of multi-mode predictions.Extensive experiments on the closed-loop NAVSIM and Bench2Drive benchmarks, as well as the open-loop nuScenes dataset, demonstrate that DIVER significantly improves trajectory diversity, effectively addressing the mode collapse problem inherent in imitation learning.

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 5, 2025

MapAgent: An Industrial-Grade Agentic Framework for City-scale Lane-level Map Generation

Lane-level maps are critical infrastructure for autonomous driving and lane-level navigation, yet constructing and maintaining standardized lane networks for hundreds of cities remains highly labor-intensive. Recent end-to-end vectorized mapping methods can predict lane geometry and topology directly from sensor data, but they typically treat mapping specifications and traffic regulations as implicit, dataset-dependent supervision. Moreover, in complex scenes (e.g., worn or missing markings and occlusions), correct lane configurations are often under-determined by visual evidence alone, making specification violations a major source of human post-editing. We propose MapAgent, an industrial-grade agentic architecture that augments a vectorization backbone for specification-compliant lane-map production. Rather than merely adding an agent loop to map prediction, MapAgent couples backbone perception with explicit specification verification, constraint-aware reasoning, and deterministic map editing under a bounded, verification-driven Judge-Planner-Worker loop. A vision-language Judge diagnoses errors by jointly inspecting visual evidence and draft vectors, while a tool-calling Planner generates minimal corrective edits with post-edit re-validation. To remain scalable for city-scale production, MapAgent is selectively triggered only on tiles with low backbone confidence, adding modest overhead while preserving throughput. Experiments on real-world datasets show consistent gains over strong production baselines, especially in complex and long-tail scenarios. Additionally, MapAgent has been integrated into Baidu Maps, supporting lane-level map generation for over 360 cities nationwide and elevating the overall production automation to over 95%, demonstrating MapAgent's practicality and effectiveness for large-scale lane-level map generation.

baidu BAIDU
·
Jun 2 2

Temporal Prompting Matters: Rethinking Referring Video Object Segmentation

Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) aims to segment the object referred to by the query sentence in the video. Most existing methods require end-to-end training with dense mask annotations, which could be computation-consuming and less scalable. In this work, we rethink the RVOS problem and aim to investigate the key to this task. Based on existing foundation segmentation models, we decompose the RVOS task into referring, video, and segmentation factors, and propose a Temporal Prompt Generation and Selection (Tenet) framework to address the referring and video factors while leaving the segmentation problem to foundation models. To efficiently adapt image-based foundation segmentation models to referring video object segmentation, we leverage off-the-shelf object detectors and trackers to produce temporal prompts associated with the referring sentence. While high-quality temporal prompts could be produced, they can not be easily identified from confidence scores. To tackle this issue, we propose Prompt Preference Learning to evaluate the quality of the produced temporal prompts. By taking such prompts to instruct image-based foundation segmentation models, we would be able to produce high-quality masks for the referred object, enabling efficient model adaptation to referring video object segmentation. Experiments on RVOS benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the Tenet framework.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 8, 2025 2

PersonaDrive: Controllable Trajectory Prediction with Multi-Dimensional Driving Personas

Although recent trajectory prediction and end-to-end autonomous driving methods improve robustness in urban environments, they still lack meaningful controllability. Existing benchmarks either provide no persona-conditioned annotations or support only a single urgency spectrum (i.e., emergency, normal, relaxed), which cannot distinguish personas that share the same urgency level but require different driving dynamics. To address this, we propose (i) the Persona-Conditioned Trajectory (PCT) dataset, which decomposes driving personas along two axes, Temporal Urgency and Ride Comfort, and combines three levels of each to form a grid of nine personas, each paired with natural-language descriptions and trajectories, and (ii) PersonaDrive, a framework that can learn driving personas from language and can generate persona-specific trajectories. PersonaDrive incorporates Persona-Conditioned Anchor Transform (PCAT), which hierarchically reshapes anchors along both axes, and Persona-Conditioned Multi-Modal Fusion (PCMF) for BEV-level persona fusion. Training is supervised by a Hierarchical Guide Loss enforcing axis-aligned physical orderings and an Axis-Decomposed Diversity Loss preventing diagonal mode collapse. Experimental results show that PersonaDrive consistently improves over the compared baselines across multi-dimensional scenarios. The code and PCT dataset are available at https://github.com/VisualAIKHU/PersonaDrive

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 14

BQ-NCO: Bisimulation Quotienting for Efficient Neural Combinatorial Optimization

Despite the success of neural-based combinatorial optimization methods for end-to-end heuristic learning, out-of-distribution generalization remains a challenge. In this paper, we present a novel formulation of Combinatorial Optimization Problems (COPs) as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that effectively leverages common symmetries of COPs to improve out-of-distribution robustness. Starting from a direct MDP formulation of a constructive method, we introduce a generic way to reduce the state space, based on Bisimulation Quotienting (BQ) in MDPs. Then, for COPs with a recursive nature, we specialize the bisimulation and show how the reduced state exploits the symmetries of these problems and facilitates MDP solving. Our approach is principled and we prove that an optimal policy for the proposed BQ-MDP actually solves the associated COPs. We illustrate our approach on five classical problems: the Euclidean and Asymmetric Traveling Salesman, Capacitated Vehicle Routing, Orienteering and Knapsack Problems. Furthermore, for each problem, we introduce a simple attention-based policy network for the BQ-MDPs, which we train by imitation of (near) optimal solutions of small instances from a single distribution. We obtain new state-of-the-art results for the five COPs on both synthetic and realistic benchmarks. Notably, in contrast to most existing neural approaches, our learned policies show excellent generalization performance to much larger instances than seen during training, without any additional search procedure.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 9, 2023

Egocentric Planning for Scalable Embodied Task Achievement

Embodied agents face significant challenges when tasked with performing actions in diverse environments, particularly in generalizing across object types and executing suitable actions to accomplish tasks. Furthermore, agents should exhibit robustness, minimizing the execution of illegal actions. In this work, we present Egocentric Planning, an innovative approach that combines symbolic planning and Object-oriented POMDPs to solve tasks in complex environments, harnessing existing models for visual perception and natural language processing. We evaluated our approach in ALFRED, a simulated environment designed for domestic tasks, and demonstrated its high scalability, achieving an impressive 36.07% unseen success rate in the ALFRED benchmark and winning the ALFRED challenge at CVPR Embodied AI workshop. Our method requires reliable perception and the specification or learning of a symbolic description of the preconditions and effects of the agent's actions, as well as what object types reveal information about others. It is capable of naturally scaling to solve new tasks beyond ALFRED, as long as they can be solved using the available skills. This work offers a solid baseline for studying end-to-end and hybrid methods that aim to generalize to new tasks, including recent approaches relying on LLMs, but often struggle to scale to long sequences of actions or produce robust plans for novel tasks.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 2, 2023

NaviDC-OCR: Navigating Document Parsing Across Digital and Camera-Captured Documents

Document parsing aims to transform unstructured documents into structured and machine-readable representations. Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly advanced document parsing. However, existing approaches still face two major challenges. First, decoupled VLM-based methods heavily rely on accurate layout analysis, where geometric distortions in camera-captured documents can introduce cascading errors. Second, although end-to-end VLM-based methods alleviate the dependence on explicit layout detection, they often suffer from redundant generation, hallucinations, and insufficient structural reasoning in high-resolution scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose NaviDC-OCR, a unified framework for document parsing. NaviDC-OCR introduces deformation-aware learning to incorporate geometric perception into VLMs and proposes an adaptive sampling mechanism for complex layout representation. Furthermore, a content-structure decoupled learning strategy is developed to explicitly model formula grammars and table structures, enabling more effective structured representation learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NaviDC-OCR achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse document parsing benchmarks. It obtains overall scores of 96.87, 88.53 and 78.41 on OmniDocBench v1.6, Wild-OmniDocBench, and PureDocBench, respectively, and ranks first in the ICDAR 2026 Sci-ImageMiner Challenge. These results validate the effectiveness and generalization capability of NaviDC-OCR in complex document parsing scenarios.

StarDoc-AI StarDoc-AI
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Aug 12 2

Empowering Low-Light Image Enhancer through Customized Learnable Priors

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable progress in enhancing low-light images by improving their brightness and eliminating noise. However, most existing methods construct end-to-end mapping networks heuristically, neglecting the intrinsic prior of image enhancement task and lacking transparency and interpretability. Although some unfolding solutions have been proposed to relieve these issues, they rely on proximal operator networks that deliver ambiguous and implicit priors. In this work, we propose a paradigm for low-light image enhancement that explores the potential of customized learnable priors to improve the transparency of the deep unfolding paradigm. Motivated by the powerful feature representation capability of Masked Autoencoder (MAE), we customize MAE-based illumination and noise priors and redevelop them from two perspectives: 1) structure flow: we train the MAE from a normal-light image to its illumination properties and then embed it into the proximal operator design of the unfolding architecture; and m2) optimization flow: we train MAE from a normal-light image to its gradient representation and then employ it as a regularization term to constrain noise in the model output. These designs improve the interpretability and representation capability of the model.Extensive experiments on multiple low-light image enhancement datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed paradigm over state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/zheng980629/CUE.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 5, 2023

AIT-QA: Question Answering Dataset over Complex Tables in the Airline Industry

Recent advances in transformers have enabled Table Question Answering (Table QA) systems to achieve high accuracy and SOTA results on open domain datasets like WikiTableQuestions and WikiSQL. Such transformers are frequently pre-trained on open-domain content such as Wikipedia, where they effectively encode questions and corresponding tables from Wikipedia as seen in Table QA dataset. However, web tables in Wikipedia are notably flat in their layout, with the first row as the sole column header. The layout lends to a relational view of tables where each row is a tuple. Whereas, tables in domain-specific business or scientific documents often have a much more complex layout, including hierarchical row and column headers, in addition to having specialized vocabulary terms from that domain. To address this problem, we introduce the domain-specific Table QA dataset AIT-QA (Airline Industry Table QA). The dataset consists of 515 questions authored by human annotators on 116 tables extracted from public U.S. SEC filings (publicly available at: https://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml) of major airline companies for the fiscal years 2017-2019. We also provide annotations pertaining to the nature of questions, marking those that require hierarchical headers, domain-specific terminology, and paraphrased forms. Our zero-shot baseline evaluation of three transformer-based SOTA Table QA methods - TaPAS (end-to-end), TaBERT (semantic parsing-based), and RCI (row-column encoding-based) - clearly exposes the limitation of these methods in this practical setting, with the best accuracy at just 51.8\% (RCI). We also present pragmatic table preprocessing steps used to pivot and project these complex tables into a layout suitable for the SOTA Table QA models.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 24, 2021

CARLA-GS: Decoupling Representation, Reasoning, and Physics Simulation for Autonomous Driving Corner-Case Synthesis

Safety evaluation for autonomous driving is dominated by rare, safety-critical interactions, motivating simulators that can deliberately synthesize corner cases with photorealistic observations. Corner-case generation is inherently a multi-source problem spanning visual representation, scene reasoning, and vehicle trajectory generation and control. Prior knowledge- and model-based approaches typically focus on scene or trajectory components in isolation, while diffusion-based methods attempt end-to-end generation but still struggle to ensure spatiotemporal consistency and physical realism. To unify these aspects within a single framework, we propose CARLA-GS, a modular corner-case synthesis pipeline that decouples visual representation, semantic reasoning, and physics-based execution while maintaining tight cross-module coupling. Starting from real driving data, we reconstruct an editable gaussian scene with additional geometry-consistent constraints. A multi-agent LLM then performs scene-level reasoning to identify risky interactions and generate intent-level waypoint trajectories, while the low-level motion control is delegated to CARLA, where a PID controller ensures kinematic and dynamic feasibility. The simulated vehicle states are finally re-projected into the gaussian scene for ego-centric rendering. This design enables high-level semantic reasoning, low-level physically executable motion, and photorealistic corner-case generation within a unified pipeline. Experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset show, both quantitatively and qualitatively, that our framework enables controllable corner-case generation and produces photorealistic, spatiotemporally consistent videos aligned with semantic intent and physically feasible motion.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 7

End-to-End Dexterous Arm-Hand VLA Policies via Shared Autonomy: VR Teleoperation Augmented by Autonomous Hand VLA Policy for Efficient Data Collection

Achieving human-like dexterous manipulation remains a major challenge for general-purpose robots. While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show potential in learning skills from demonstrations, their scalability is limited by scarce high-quality training data. Existing data collection methods face inherent constraints: manual teleoperation overloads human operators, while automated planning often produces unnatural motions. We propose a Shared Autonomy framework that divides control between macro and micro motions. A human operator guides the robot's arm pose through intuitive VR teleoperation, while an autonomous DexGrasp-VLA policy handles fine-grained hand control using real-time tactile and visual feedback. This division significantly reduces cognitive load and enables efficient collection of high-quality coordinated arm-hand demonstrations. Using this data, we train an end-to-end VLA policy enhanced with our novel Arm-Hand Feature Enhancement module, which captures both distinct and shared representations of macro and micro movements for more natural coordination. Our Corrective Teleoperation system enables continuous policy improvement through human-in-the-loop failure recovery. Experiments demonstrate that our framework generates high-quality data with minimal manpower and achieves a 90% success rate across diverse objects, including unseen instances. Comprehensive evaluations validate the system's effectiveness in developing dexterous manipulation capabilities.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 31, 2025

End-to-End Meta-Bayesian Optimisation with Transformer Neural Processes

Meta-Bayesian optimisation (meta-BO) aims to improve the sample efficiency of Bayesian optimisation by leveraging data from related tasks. While previous methods successfully meta-learn either a surrogate model or an acquisition function independently, joint training of both components remains an open challenge. This paper proposes the first end-to-end differentiable meta-BO framework that generalises neural processes to learn acquisition functions via transformer architectures. We enable this end-to-end framework with reinforcement learning (RL) to tackle the lack of labelled acquisition data. Early on, we notice that training transformer-based neural processes from scratch with RL is challenging due to insufficient supervision, especially when rewards are sparse. We formalise this claim with a combinatorial analysis showing that the widely used notion of regret as a reward signal exhibits a logarithmic sparsity pattern in trajectory lengths. To tackle this problem, we augment the RL objective with an auxiliary task that guides part of the architecture to learn a valid probabilistic model as an inductive bias. We demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art regret results against various baselines in experiments on standard hyperparameter optimisation tasks and also outperforms others in the real-world problems of mixed-integer programming tuning, antibody design, and logic synthesis for electronic design automation.

  • 4 authors
·
May 25, 2023

End-to-End Agentic RAG System Training for Traceable Diagnostic Reasoning

Accurate diagnosis with medical large language models is hindered by knowledge gaps and hallucinations. Retrieval and tool-augmented methods help, but their impact is limited by weak use of external knowledge and poor feedback-reasoning traceability. To address these challenges, We introduce Deep-DxSearch, an agentic RAG system trained end-to-end with reinforcement learning (RL) that enables steer tracebale retrieval-augmented reasoning for medical diagnosis. In Deep-DxSearch, we first construct a large-scale medical retrieval corpus comprising patient records and reliable medical knowledge sources to support retrieval-aware reasoning across diagnostic scenarios. More crutially, we frame the LLM as the core agent and the retrieval corpus as its environment, using tailored rewards on format, retrieval, reasoning structure, and diagnostic accuracy, thereby evolving the agentic RAG policy from large-scale data through RL. Experiments demonstrate that our end-to-end agentic RL training framework consistently outperforms prompt-engineering and training-free RAG approaches across multiple data centers. After training, Deep-DxSearch achieves substantial gains in diagnostic accuracy, surpassing strong diagnostic baselines such as GPT-4o, DeepSeek-R1, and other medical-specific frameworks for both common and rare disease diagnosis under in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings. Moreover, ablation studies on reward design and retrieval corpus components confirm their critical roles, underscoring the uniqueness and effectiveness of our approach compared with traditional implementations. Finally, case studies and interpretability analyses highlight improvements in Deep-DxSearch's diagnostic policy, providing deeper insight into its performance gains and supporting clinicians in delivering more reliable and precise preliminary diagnoses. See https://github.com/MAGIC-AI4Med/Deep-DxSearch.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 21, 2025 2

End-to-end Adaptive Dynamic Subsampling and Reconstruction for Cardiac MRI

Background: Accelerating dynamic MRI is vital for advancing clinical applications and improving patient comfort. Commonly, deep learning (DL) methods for accelerated dynamic MRI reconstruction typically rely on uniformly applying non-adaptive predetermined or random subsampling patterns across all temporal frames of the dynamic acquisition. This approach fails to exploit temporal correlations or optimize subsampling on a case-by-case basis. Purpose: To develop an end-to-end approach for adaptive dynamic MRI subsampling and reconstruction, capable of generating customized sampling patterns maximizing at the same time reconstruction quality. Methods: We introduce the End-to-end Adaptive Dynamic Sampling and Reconstruction (E2E-ADS-Recon) for MRI framework, which integrates an adaptive dynamic sampler (ADS) that adapts the acquisition trajectory to each case for a given acceleration factor with a state-of-the-art dynamic reconstruction network, vSHARP, for reconstructing the adaptively sampled data into a dynamic image. The ADS can produce either frame-specific patterns or unified patterns applied to all temporal frames. E2E-ADS-Recon is evaluated under both frame-specific and unified 1D or 2D sampling settings, using dynamic cine cardiac MRI data and compared with vSHARP models employing standard subsampling trajectories, as well as pipelines where ADS was replaced by parameterized samplers optimized for dataset-specific schemes. Results: E2E-ADS-Recon exhibited superior reconstruction quality, especially at high accelerations, in terms of standard quantitative metrics (SSIM, pSNR, NMSE). Conclusion: The proposed framework improves reconstruction quality, highlighting the importance of case-specific subsampling optimization in dynamic MRI applications.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 20, 2025

End-to-End Self-Supervised RGB-T Tracking without Modality Misleading

RGB-T object tracking leverages the complementary characteristics of visible and thermal infrared modalities to improve robustness under adverse conditions. Existing supervised methods typically rely on costly modality-aligned bounding box annotations, while most self-supervised approaches follow a two-stage pseudo-labeling paradigm, making tracker training sensitive to pseudo-label quality and preventing joint end-to-end optimization. In this paper, we propose ESMTrack, a fully end-to-end self-supervised RGB-T tracking framework without offline pseudo-label generation or dense frame-level bounding box annotations. Given only the standard initial-frame annotation used in visual tracking, ESMTrack learns discriminative and temporally consistent representations through two complementary objectives: a grounding triplet loss on annotated initial frames and a cross-frame temporal triplet loss on unlabeled search frames, with reliable samples selected by forward-backward consistency. To address modality dominance bias, ESMTrack employs a three-branch architecture consisting of a fusion branch and two unimodal branches for RGB and thermal inputs. We quantify modality contributions using the Average Peak-to-Correlation Energy by measuring response discrepancies between the fusion and unimodal branches. The resulting reliability estimates guide a training-time modality decoupling mechanism that suppresses dominant-modality shortcuts and adaptively weights cross-modal contrastive learning for task-level alignment. Extensive experiments on five RGB-T tracking benchmarks show that ESMTrack achieves competitive state-of-the-art performance, strong cross-dataset generalization, and real-time inference speed. The source code is available at https://github.com/LiShenglana/ESMTrack.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 28

End-to-End Dense Video Captioning with Parallel Decoding

Dense video captioning aims to generate multiple associated captions with their temporal locations from the video. Previous methods follow a sophisticated "localize-then-describe" scheme, which heavily relies on numerous hand-crafted components. In this paper, we proposed a simple yet effective framework for end-to-end dense video captioning with parallel decoding (PDVC), by formulating the dense caption generation as a set prediction task. In practice, through stacking a newly proposed event counter on the top of a transformer decoder, the PDVC precisely segments the video into a number of event pieces under the holistic understanding of the video content, which effectively increases the coherence and readability of predicted captions. Compared with prior arts, the PDVC has several appealing advantages: (1) Without relying on heuristic non-maximum suppression or a recurrent event sequence selection network to remove redundancy, PDVC directly produces an event set with an appropriate size; (2) In contrast to adopting the two-stage scheme, we feed the enhanced representations of event queries into the localization head and caption head in parallel, making these two sub-tasks deeply interrelated and mutually promoted through the optimization; (3) Without bells and whistles, extensive experiments on ActivityNet Captions and YouCook2 show that PDVC is capable of producing high-quality captioning results, surpassing the state-of-the-art two-stage methods when its localization accuracy is on par with them. Code is available at https://github.com/ttengwang/PDVC.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 17, 2021

VectorMapNet: End-to-end Vectorized HD Map Learning

Autonomous driving systems require High-Definition (HD) semantic maps to navigate around urban roads. Existing solutions approach the semantic mapping problem by offline manual annotation, which suffers from serious scalability issues. Recent learning-based methods produce dense rasterized segmentation predictions to construct maps. However, these predictions do not include instance information of individual map elements and require heuristic post-processing to obtain vectorized maps. To tackle these challenges, we introduce an end-to-end vectorized HD map learning pipeline, termed VectorMapNet. VectorMapNet takes onboard sensor observations and predicts a sparse set of polylines in the bird's-eye view. This pipeline can explicitly model the spatial relation between map elements and generate vectorized maps that are friendly to downstream autonomous driving tasks. Extensive experiments show that VectorMapNet achieve strong map learning performance on both nuScenes and Argoverse2 dataset, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by 14.2 mAP and 14.6mAP. Qualitatively, VectorMapNet is capable of generating comprehensive maps and capturing fine-grained details of road geometry. To the best of our knowledge, VectorMapNet is the first work designed towards end-to-end vectorized map learning from onboard observations. Our project website is available at https://tsinghua-mars-lab.github.io/vectormapnet/.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 17, 2022

Towards End-to-End Lane Detection: an Instance Segmentation Approach

Modern cars are incorporating an increasing number of driver assist features, among which automatic lane keeping. The latter allows the car to properly position itself within the road lanes, which is also crucial for any subsequent lane departure or trajectory planning decision in fully autonomous cars. Traditional lane detection methods rely on a combination of highly-specialized, hand-crafted features and heuristics, usually followed by post-processing techniques, that are computationally expensive and prone to scalability due to road scene variations. More recent approaches leverage deep learning models, trained for pixel-wise lane segmentation, even when no markings are present in the image due to their big receptive field. Despite their advantages, these methods are limited to detecting a pre-defined, fixed number of lanes, e.g. ego-lanes, and can not cope with lane changes. In this paper, we go beyond the aforementioned limitations and propose to cast the lane detection problem as an instance segmentation problem - in which each lane forms its own instance - that can be trained end-to-end. To parametrize the segmented lane instances before fitting the lane, we further propose to apply a learned perspective transformation, conditioned on the image, in contrast to a fixed "bird's-eye view" transformation. By doing so, we ensure a lane fitting which is robust against road plane changes, unlike existing approaches that rely on a fixed, pre-defined transformation. In summary, we propose a fast lane detection algorithm, running at 50 fps, which can handle a variable number of lanes and cope with lane changes. We verify our method on the tuSimple dataset and achieve competitive results.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 15, 2018

End-to-End On-Device Quantization-Aware Training for LLMs at Inference Cost

Quantization is an effective technique to reduce the deployment cost of large language models (LLMs), and post-training quantization (PTQ) has been widely studied due to its efficiency. However, existing PTQ methods are limited by their inability to fine-tune model parameters and often suffer significant accuracy loss in low-bit scenarios. Quantization-aware training (QAT) provides a more principled solution, but its reliance on backpropagation incurs prohibitive memory costs, limiting its practicality for LLM deployment. To address these challenges, we propose ZeroQAT, a zeroth-order optimization-based QAT framework that supports both weight and activation quantization. ZeroQAT leverages forward-only gradient estimation to eliminate backpropagation, substantially reducing computational and memory overhead while retaining the benefits of end-to-end optimization. We further introduce a lightweight variant of ZeroQAT for quantized fine-tuning, which freezes and pre-quantizes most parameters to further cut memory usage. Experiments show that ZeroQAT consistently outperforms representative PTQ and QAT baselines while requiring significantly less memory. For example, ZeroQAT enables fine-tuning of a 13B model at extremely low bit-widths (e.g., 2-4 bits) on a single 8GB GPU, and even allows fine-tuning a 6.7B model on a OnePlus 12 smartphone, demonstrating its practicality for end-to-end QAT on resource-limited edge devices.

  • 12 authors
·
Aug 20, 2025

End-to-End Context Compression at Scale

Long-context language model inference is bottlenecked by memory, as the KV cache grows with context length. Recent techniques to compress the KV cache fall short: they either degrade model quality substantially or require considerable time and compute to compress a single long prompt. Furthermore, many methods require the input to fit within the target model's context window, and are generally incompatible with modern production inference engines. Encoder-decoder compressors, which map a long token sequence to a shorter sequence of latent embeddings consumed by a decoder, are an appealing alternative in principle. However, existing approaches are not competitive with KV cache compression on the accuracy-efficiency frontier. In this work, we revisit encoder-decoder compression and close this gap. We first perform an architecture search, pre-training many variants from scratch to determine how best to design and train encoder-decoder compressors. Guided by our findings, we continually pre-train a family of 0.6B-encoder, 4B-decoder models on over 350B tokens each, at compression ratios of 1:4, 1:8, and 1:16. We introduce Latent Context Language Models (LCLMs), a family of compressors that improve the Pareto frontier across general-task performance, compression speed, and peak memory usage. We demonstrate that LCLMs serve as efficient backbones for long-horizon agents, letting the agent skim through a compressed long context and adaptively expand relevant segments on demand.

  • 15 authors
·
Jun 7 2

End-To-End Prediction of Knee Osteoarthritis Progression With Multi-Modal Transformers

Knee Osteoarthritis (KOA) is a highly prevalent chronic musculoskeletal condition with no currently available treatment. The manifestation of KOA is heterogeneous and prediction of its progression is challenging. Current literature suggests that the use of multi-modal data and advanced modeling methods, such as the ones based on Deep Learning, has promise in tackling this challenge. To date, however, the evidence on the efficacy of this approach is limited. In this study, we leveraged recent advances in Deep Learning and, using a Transformer approach, developed a unified framework for the multi-modal fusion of knee imaging data. Subsequently, we analyzed its performance across a range of scenarios by investigating multiple progression horizons -- from short-term to long-term. We report our findings using a large cohort (n=2421-3967) derived from the Osteoarthritis Initiative dataset. We show that structural knee MRI allows identifying radiographic KOA progressors on par with multi-modal fusion approaches, achieving an area under the ROC curve (ROC AUC) of 0.70-0.76 and Average Precision (AP) of 0.15-0.54 in 2-8 year horizons. Progression within 1 year was better predicted with a multi-modal method using X-ray, structural, and compositional MR images -- ROC AUC of 0.76(0.04), AP of 0.13(0.04) -- or via clinical data. Our follow-up analysis generally shows that prediction from the imaging data is more accurate for post-traumatic subjects, and we further investigate which subject subgroups may benefit the most. The present study provides novel insights into multi-modal imaging of KOA and brings a unified data-driven framework for studying its progression in an end-to-end manner, providing new tools for the design of more efficient clinical trials. The source code of our framework and the pre-trained models are made publicly available.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 3, 2023

NaturalL2S: End-to-End High-quality Multispeaker Lip-to-Speech Synthesis with Differential Digital Signal Processing

Recent advancements in visual speech recognition (VSR) have promoted progress in lip-to-speech synthesis, where pre-trained VSR models enhance the intelligibility of synthesized speech by providing valuable semantic information. The success achieved by cascade frameworks, which combine pseudo-VSR with pseudo-text-to-speech (TTS) or implicitly utilize the transcribed text, highlights the benefits of leveraging VSR models. However, these methods typically rely on mel-spectrograms as an intermediate representation, which may introduce a key bottleneck: the domain gap between synthetic mel-spectrograms, generated from inherently error-prone lip-to-speech mappings, and real mel-spectrograms used to train vocoders. This mismatch inevitably degrades synthesis quality. To bridge this gap, we propose Natural Lip-to-Speech (NaturalL2S), an end-to-end framework integrating acoustic inductive biases with differentiable speech generation components. Specifically, we introduce a fundamental frequency (F0) predictor to capture prosodic variations in synthesized speech. The predicted F0 then drives a Differentiable Digital Signal Processing (DDSP) synthesizer to generate a coarse signal which serves as prior information for subsequent speech synthesis. Additionally, instead of relying on a reference speaker embedding as an auxiliary input, our approach achieves satisfactory performance on speaker similarity without explicitly modelling speaker characteristics. Both objective and subjective evaluation results demonstrate that NaturalL2S can effectively enhance the quality of the synthesized speech when compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our demonstration page is accessible at https://yifan-liang.github.io/NaturalL2S/.

  • 5 authors
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Feb 17, 2025 1

PanopticSplatting: End-to-End Panoptic Gaussian Splatting

Open-vocabulary panoptic reconstruction is a challenging task for simultaneous scene reconstruction and understanding. Recently, methods have been proposed for 3D scene understanding based on Gaussian splatting. However, these methods are multi-staged, suffering from the accumulated errors and the dependence of hand-designed components. To streamline the pipeline and achieve global optimization, we propose PanopticSplatting, an end-to-end system for open-vocabulary panoptic reconstruction. Our method introduces query-guided Gaussian segmentation with local cross attention, lifting 2D instance masks without cross-frame association in an end-to-end way. The local cross attention within view frustum effectively reduces the training memory, making our model more accessible to large scenes with more Gaussians and objects. In addition, to address the challenge of noisy labels in 2D pseudo masks, we propose label blending to promote consistent 3D segmentation with less noisy floaters, as well as label warping on 2D predictions which enhances multi-view coherence and segmentation accuracy. Our method demonstrates strong performances in 3D scene panoptic reconstruction on the ScanNet-V2 and ScanNet++ datasets, compared with both NeRF-based and Gaussian-based panoptic reconstruction methods. Moreover, PanopticSplatting can be easily generalized to numerous variants of Gaussian splatting, and we demonstrate its robustness on different Gaussian base models.

  • 8 authors
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Mar 23, 2025

InfoGNN: End-to-end deep learning on mesh via graph neural networks

3D models are widely used in various industries, and mesh data has become an indispensable part of 3D modeling because of its unique advantages. Mesh data can provide an intuitive and practical expression of rich 3D information. However, its disordered, irregular data structure and complex surface information make it challenging to apply with deep learning models directly. Traditional mesh data processing methods often rely on mesh models with many limitations, such as manifold, which restrict their application scopes in reality and do not fully utilize the advantages of mesh models. This paper proposes a novel end-to-end framework for addressing the challenges associated with deep learning in mesh models centered around graph neural networks (GNN) and is titled InfoGNN. InfoGNN treats the mesh model as a graph, which enables it to handle irregular mesh data efficiently. Moreover, we propose InfoConv and InfoMP modules, which utilize the position information of the points and fully use the static information such as face normals, dihedral angles, and dynamic global feature information to fully use all kinds of data. In addition, InfoGNN is an end-to-end framework, and we simplify the network design to make it more efficient, paving the way for efficient deep learning of complex 3D models. We conducted experiments on several publicly available datasets, and the results show that InfoGNN achieves excellent performance in mesh classification and segmentation tasks.

  • 3 authors
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Mar 4, 2025

LinEAS: End-to-end Learning of Activation Steering with a Distributional Loss

The growing use of generative models in daily life calls for efficient mechanisms to control their generation, to e.g., produce safe content or provide users with tools to explore style changes. Ideally, such mechanisms should require low volume of unpaired data (i.e., without explicit preference), and should be cheap, both at train and inference time, while preserving output quality. Recent research has shown that such mechanisms can be obtained by intervening exclusively on model activations, with the goal of correcting distributional differences between activations seen when using prompts from a source vs. a target set (e.g., toxic and non-toxic sentences). While cheap, these fast methods are inherently crude: their maps are tuned locally, not accounting for their impact on downstream layers, resulting in interventions that cause unintended shifts when used out-of-sample. We propose in this work linear end-to-end activation steering (LinEAS), an approach trained with a global loss that accounts simultaneously for all layer-wise distributional shifts. In addition to being more robust, the loss used to train LinEAS can be regularized with sparsifying norms, which can automatically carry out neuron selection. LinEAS only requires a handful of unpaired samples to be effective, and beats similar baselines on toxicity mitigation in language models, becoming competitive with oracle-dependent methods that have access to strong supervision. LinEAS is modality-agnostic and we empirically find that it outperforms existing activation steering methods at mitigating and including new concepts at the output of single-step text-to-image generation models.

apple Apple
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Mar 11, 2025 1

TransVG++: End-to-End Visual Grounding with Language Conditioned Vision Transformer

In this work, we explore neat yet effective Transformer-based frameworks for visual grounding. The previous methods generally address the core problem of visual grounding, i.e., multi-modal fusion and reasoning, with manually-designed mechanisms. Such heuristic designs are not only complicated but also make models easily overfit specific data distributions. To avoid this, we first propose TransVG, which establishes multi-modal correspondences by Transformers and localizes referred regions by directly regressing box coordinates. We empirically show that complicated fusion modules can be replaced by a simple stack of Transformer encoder layers with higher performance. However, the core fusion Transformer in TransVG is stand-alone against uni-modal encoders, and thus should be trained from scratch on limited visual grounding data, which makes it hard to be optimized and leads to sub-optimal performance. To this end, we further introduce TransVG++ to make two-fold improvements. For one thing, we upgrade our framework to a purely Transformer-based one by leveraging Vision Transformer (ViT) for vision feature encoding. For another, we devise Language Conditioned Vision Transformer that removes external fusion modules and reuses the uni-modal ViT for vision-language fusion at the intermediate layers. We conduct extensive experiments on five prevalent datasets, and report a series of state-of-the-art records.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 14, 2022

End-to-End Semantic ID Generation for Generative Advertisement Recommendation

Generative Recommendation (GR) has excelled by framing recommendation as next-token prediction. This paradigm relies on Semantic IDs (SIDs) to tokenize large-scale items into discrete sequences. Existing GR approaches predominantly generate SIDs via Residual Quantization (RQ), where items are encoded into embeddings and then quantized to discrete SIDs. However, this paradigm suffers from inherent limitations: 1) Objective misalignment and semantic degradation stemming from the two-stage compression; 2) Error accumulation inherent in the structure of RQ. To address these limitations, we propose UniSID, a Unified SID generation framework for generative advertisement recommendation. Specifically, we jointly optimize embeddings and SIDs in an end-to-end manner from raw advertising data, enabling semantic information to flow directly into the SID space and thus addressing the inherent limitations of the two-stage cascading compression paradigm. To capture fine-grained semantics, a multi-granularity contrastive learning strategy is introduced to align distinct items across SID levels. Finally, a summary-based ad reconstruction mechanism is proposed to encourage SIDs to capture high-level semantic information that is not explicitly present in advertising contexts. Experiments demonstrate that UniSID consistently outperforms state-of-the-art SID generation methods, yielding up to a 4.62% improvement in Hit Rate metrics across downstream advertising scenarios compared to the strongest baseline.

  • 11 authors
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Feb 11

An End-to-End Reinforcement Learning Approach for Job-Shop Scheduling Problems Based on Constraint Programming

Constraint Programming (CP) is a declarative programming paradigm that allows for modeling and solving combinatorial optimization problems, such as the Job-Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP). While CP solvers manage to find optimal or near-optimal solutions for small instances, they do not scale well to large ones, i.e., they require long computation times or yield low-quality solutions. Therefore, real-world scheduling applications often resort to fast, handcrafted, priority-based dispatching heuristics to find a good initial solution and then refine it using optimization methods. This paper proposes a novel end-to-end approach to solving scheduling problems by means of CP and Reinforcement Learning (RL). In contrast to previous RL methods, tailored for a given problem by including procedural simulation algorithms, complex feature engineering, or handcrafted reward functions, our neural-network architecture and training algorithm merely require a generic CP encoding of some scheduling problem along with a set of small instances. Our approach leverages existing CP solvers to train an agent learning a Priority Dispatching Rule (PDR) that generalizes well to large instances, even from separate datasets. We evaluate our method on seven JSSP datasets from the literature, showing its ability to find higher-quality solutions for very large instances than obtained by static PDRs and by a CP solver within the same time limit.

  • 3 authors
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Jun 9, 2023