United States

Occupancy prediction plays a pivotal role in autonomous driving (AD) due to its capabilities of fine-grained 3D perception and general object recognition. However, existing methods often incur high computational costs, which conflict with AD&#39;s real-time demand. To this end, we redirect the focus from accuracy only to both accuracy and efficiency. By conducting a head-to-head comparison of existing methods, we find it challenging to balance accuracy and efficiency. We identify a core issue for this challenge: the strong coupling between geometry and semantics. Specifically, the predicted geometric structure (e.g., depth) guides the projection of 2D image features into 3D voxel space, which significantly affects feature discriminability and subsequent semantic learning. To address this issue, we focus on two key aspects: model design and learning strategies. 1) For model design, we propose a dual-branch network that decouples the representation of geometry and semantics. The voxel branch utilizes a novel re-parameterized large-kernel 3D convolution to refine geometric structure efficiently, while the BEV branch employs temporal fusion and BEV encoding for efficient semantic learning. 2) For learning strategies, we propose to separate geometric learning from semantic learning by the mixup of ground-truth and predicted depths.
Our method achieves 39.4\% mIoU at 20 FPS on Occ3D-nuScenes benchmark, showcasing a state-of-the-art balance between accuracy and efficiency. Codes are available in supplementary materials.

AAAI 2025

Achieving Speed-Accuracy Balance in Vision-based 3D Occupancy Prediction via Geometric-Semantic Disentanglement

3d computer vision

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.



Occupancy prediction plays a pivotal role in autonomous driving (AD) due to its capabilities of fine-grained 3D perception and general object recognition. However, existing methods often incur high computational costs, which conflict with AD's real-time demand. To this end, we redirect the focus from accuracy only to both accuracy and efficiency. By conducting a head-to-head comparison of existing methods, we find it challenging to balance accuracy and efficiency. We identify a core issue for this challenge: the strong coupling between geometry and semantics. Specifically, the predicted geometric structure (e.g., depth) guides the projection of 2D image features into 3D voxel space, which significantly affects feature discriminability and subsequent semantic learning. To address this issue, we focus on two key aspects: model design and learning strategies. 1) For model design, we propose a dual-branch network that decouples the representation of geometry and semantics. The voxel branch utilizes a novel re-parameterized large-kernel 3D convolution to refine geometric structure efficiently, while the BEV branch employs temporal fusion and BEV encoding for efficient semantic learning. 2) For learning strategies, we propose to separate geometric learning from semantic learning by the mixup of ground-truth and predicted depths.
Our method achieves 39.4\% mIoU at 20 FPS on Occ3D-nuScenes benchmark, showcasing a state-of-the-art balance between accuracy and efficiency. Codes are available in supplementary materials.

poster

Sequential Recommenders (SRs) are trained to predict the next item as the target given its preceding items as the input, assuming that every input-target pair is matched and is reliable for training. However, users can be induced by external distractions (e.g. friends’ recommendations) to click on items inconsistent with their true preferences, resulting in unreliable training instances with mismatched input-target pairs. To resist unreliable data, researchers attempt to develop Robust SRs (RSRs). However, our data analysis unveils that existing RSRs are data-driven, which tend to classify instances involving frequently co-occurred items as reliable. Yet, for most instances formed by infrequently co-occurred items, existing RSRs are uncertain about their reliability. To fill this gap, we propose a generic framework – LLM4RSR (Large Language Models for Robust Sequential Recommendation) to semantically complement data-driven RSRs by correcting uncertain instances into reliable ones based on LLMs’ semantic comprehension of items beyond co-occurrence. In this way, RSRs can be re-trained with the corrected data for better accuracy. This is a selective knowledge distillation procedure, where the LLM acts as a teacher guiding student RSRs via uncertain instances. To align LLMs with the data correction task and mitigate inherent hallucinations, we equip the LLM with profile, plan, and memory modules, which are automatically optimized via textual gradient descent, eliminating the need for human effort and expertise. Experiments on four real-world datasets spanning eight backbones verify the generality, effectiveness, and efficiency of LLM4RSR.

LLM4RSR: Large Language Models as Data Correctors for Robust Sequential Recommendation

Data-free quantization (DFQ) is a technique that creates a lightweight network from its full-precision counterpart without the original training data, often through a synthetic dataset. Although several DFQ methods have been proposed for vision transformer (ViT) architectures, they fail to achieve efficacy in low-bit settings. Examining the existing methods, we observe that their synthetic data produce misaligned attention maps, while those of the real samples are highly aligned. From this observation, we find that aligning attention maps of synthetic data helps improve the overall performance of quantized ViTs. Motivated by this finding, we devise MimiQ, a novel DFQ method designed for ViTs that enhances inter-head attention similarity. First, we generate synthetic data by aligning head-wise attention outputs from each spatial query patch. Then, we align the attention maps of the quantized network to those of the full-precision teacher by applying head-wise structural attention distillation. The experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms baselines, setting a new state-of-the-art performance for data-free ViT quantization.

MimiQ: Low-Bit Data-Free Quantization of Vision Transformers with Encouraging Inter-Head Attention Similarity

Significant advancements have been achieved in the realm of understanding poses and interactions of two hands manipulating an object. The emergence of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies has heightened the demand for real-time performance in these applications. However, current state-of-the-art models often exhibit promising results at the expense of substantial computational overhead. In this paper, we present a query-optimized real-time Transformer (QORT-Former), the first Transformer-based real-time framework for 3D pose estimation of two hands and an object. We first limit the number of queries and decoders to meet the efficiency requirement. Given limited number of queries and decoders, we propose to optimize queries which are taken as input to the Transformer decoder, to secure the good accuracy: (1) we propose to divide queries into three types (a left hand query, a right hand query and an object query) and enhance query features (2) by using the contact information between hands and an object and (3) by using two stage update of enhanced image and query features with respect to one another. With proposed methods, we achieved real-time pose estimation performance using just 108 queries and 1 decoder (53.5 FPS on an RTX 3090TI GPU). Surpassing state-of-the-art results on the H2O dataset by 17.6% (left hand), 22.8% (right hand), and 27.2% (object), as well as on the FPHA dataset by 5.3% (right hand) and 10.4% (object), our method excels in accuracy. Additionally, it sets the state-of-the-art in interaction recognition, maintaining real-time efficiency with an off-the-shelf action recognition module.

QORT-Former: Query-optimized Real-time Transformer for Understanding Two Hands Manipulating Objects

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown promising performance in novel view synthesis. Previous methods adapt it to obtaining surfaces of either individual 3D objects or within limited scenes. In this paper, we make the first attempt to tackle the challenging task of large-scale scene surface reconstruction. This task is particularly difficult due to the high GPU memory consumption, different levels of details for geometric representation, and noticeable inconsistencies in appearance. To this end, we propose GigaGS, the first work for high-quality surface reconstruction for large-scale scenes using 3DGS. GigaGS first applies a partitioning strategy based on the mutual visibility of spatial regions, which effectively grouping cameras for parallel processing. To enhance the quality of the surface, we also propose novel multi-view photometric and geometric consistency constraints based on Level-of-Detail representation. In doing so, our method can reconstruct detailed surface structures. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on various datasets. The consistent improvement demonstrates the superiority of GigaGS. All code and data will be made public upon acceptance.

GigaGS: 3D Gaussian Based Planar Representation for Large-Scene Surface Reconstruction

Editing videos with textual guidance has garnered popularity due to its streamlined process which mandates users to solely edit the text prompt corresponding to the source video. Recent studies have explored and exploited large-scale text-to-image diffusion models for text-guided video editing, resulting in remarkable video editing capabilities. However, they may still suffer from some limitations such as mislocated objects, incorrect number of objects. Therefore, the controllability of video editing remains a formidable challenge. In this paper, we aim to challenge the above limitations by proposing a Re-Attentional Controllable Video Diffusion Editing (ReAtCo) method. Specially, to align the spatial placement of the target objects with the edited text prompt in a training-free manner, we propose a Re-Attentional Diffusion (RAD) to refocus the cross-attention activation responses between the edited text prompt and the target video during the denoising stage, resulting in a spatially location-aligned and semantically high-fidelity manipulated video. In particular, to faithfully preserve the invariant region content with less border artifacts, we propose an Invariant Region-guided Joint Sampling (IRJS) strategy to mitigate the intrinsic sampling errors w.r.t the invariant regions at each denoising timestep and constrain the generated content to be harmonized with the invariant region content. Experimental results verify that ReAtCo consistently improves the controllability of video diffusion editing and achieves superior video editing performance.

Re-Attentional Controllable Video Diffusion Editing

Recent years, multi-hop reasoning has been widely studied for knowledge graph (KG) reasoning due to its efficacy and interpretability. However, previous multi-hop reasoning approaches are subject to two primary shortcomings. First, agents struggle to learn effective and robust policies at the early phase due to sparse rewards. Second, these approaches often falter on specific datasets like sparse knowledge graphs, where agents are required to traverse lengthy reasoning paths. To address these problems, we propose a multi-hop reasoning model with dual agents based on hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL), which is named FULORA. FULORA tackles the above reasoning challenges by eFficient GUidance-ExpLORAtion between dual agents. The high-level agent walks on the simplified knowledge graph to provide stage-wise hints for the low-level agent walking on the original knowledge graph. In this framework, the low-level agent optimizes a value function that balances two objectives: (1) maximizing return, and (2) integrating efficient guidance from the high-level agent. Experiments conducted on three real-word knowledge graph datasets demonstrate that FULORA outperforms RL-based baselines, especially in the case of long-distance reasoning.

Walk Wisely on Graph: Knowledge Graph Reasoning with Dual Agents via Efficient Guidance-Exploration

Camera-based Bird's Eye View (BEV) perception models receive increasing attention for their crucial role in autonomous driving system, which also raises concerns about their robustness and reliability.
While only a few works have investigated the effects of randomly generated semantic perturbations, aka natural corruptions, on the multi-view BEV detection task, we develop a black-box robustness evaluation framework that adversarially optimises three common semantic perturbations: geometric transformation, colour shifting, and motion blur, to deceive BEV models, which is the first approach in this emerging field.
To address the challenge posed by optimising the semantic perturbation, we design a smoothed, distance-based surrogate function to replace the mAP metric and introduce SimpleDIRECT, a deterministic optimisation algorithm that utilises observed slopes to guide the optimisation process.
By comparing with randomised perturbation and two optimisation baselines, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Additionally, we provide a benchmark on the semantic robustness of ten recent BEV models.
The results reveal that PolarFormer, which emphasises geometric information from multi-view images, exhibits the highest robustness, whereas BEVDet is fully compromised, with its precision reduced to zero.

A Black-Box Evaluation Framework for Semantic Robustness in Bird’s Eye View Detection

We present a significant advancement in the field of Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) methods by introducing the Inexact Proximal Langevin Algorithm (IPLA). This novel algorithm broadens the scope of problems that LMC can effectively address while maintaining controlled computational costs. IPLA extends LMC's applicability to potentials that are convex, strongly convex in the tails, and exhibit polynomial growth, beyond the conventional $L$-smoothness assumption. 
Moreover, we extend LMC's applicability to super-quadratic potentials and offer improved convergence rates over existing algorithms. Additionally, we provide bounds on all moments of the Markov chain generated by IPLA, enhancing its analytical robustness.

Langevin Monte Carlo Beyond Lipschitz Gradient Continuity

Rendering dynamic scenes from monocular videos is a crucial yet challenging task. The recent deformable Gaussian Splatting has emerged as a robust solution to represent real-world dynamic scenes. However, it often leads to heavily redundant Gaussians, attempting to fit every training view at various time steps, leading to slower rendering speeds. Additionally, the attributes of Gaussians in static areas are time-invariant, making it unnecessary to model every Gaussian, which can cause jittering in static regions. In practice, the primary bottleneck in rendering speed for dynamic scenes is the number of Gaussians. In response, we introduce Efficient Dynamic Gaussian Splatting (EDGS), which represents dynamic scenes via sparse time-variant attribute modeling. Our approach formulates dynamic scenes using a sparse anchor-grid representation, with the motion flow of dense Gaussians calculated via a classical kernel representation. Furthermore, we propose an unsupervised strategy to efficiently filter out anchors corresponding to static areas. Only anchors associated with deformable objects are input into MLPs to query time-variant attributes. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our EDGS significantly improves the rendering speed with superior rendering quality compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.

Efficient Gaussian Splatting for Monocular Dynamic Scene Rendering via Sparse Time-Variant Attribute Modeling

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown significant success in learning graph representations. However, recent studies reveal that GNNs often fail to outperform simple MLPs on heterophilous graph tasks, where connected nodes may differ in features or labels, challenging the homophily assumption. Existing methods addressing this issue often overlook the importance of information granularity and rarely consider implicit relationships between distant nodes. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Granular and Implicit Graph Network (GRAIN), a novel GNN model specifically designed for heterophilous graphs. GRAIN enhances node embeddings by aggregating multi-view information at various granularity levels and incorporating implicit data from distant, non-neighboring nodes. This approach effectively integrates local and global information, resulting in smoother, more accurate node representations. We also introduce an adaptive graph information aggregator that efficiently combines multi-granularity and implicit data, significantly improving node representation quality, as shown by experiments on 13 datasets covering varying homophily and heterophily. GRAIN consistently outperforms 12 state-of-the-art models, excelling on both homophilous and heterophilous graphs.

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