Accurately understanding and deciding high-level meta-actions is essential for ensuring reliable and safe autonomous driving systems. While vision-language models (VLMs) have shown significant potential in various autonomous driving tasks, they often suffer from limitations such as inadequate spatial perception and hallucination, reducing their effectiveness in complex autonomous driving scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a retrieval-augmented decision-making (RAD) framework, a novel architecture designed to enhance VLMs' capabilities to reliably generate meta-actions in autonomous driving scenes. RAD leverages a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline to dynamically improve decision accuracy through a three-stage process consisting of the embedding flow, retrieving flow, and generating flow. Additionally, we fine-tune VLMs on a specifically curated dataset derived from the NuScenes dataset to enhance their spatial perception and bird's-eye view image comprehension capabilities. Extensive experimental evaluations on the curated NuScenes-based dataset demonstrate that RAD outperforms baseline methods across key evaluation metrics, including match accuracy, and F1 score, and self-defined overall score, highlighting its effectiveness in improving meta-action decision-making for autonomous driving tasks.

Patent analysis highly relies on concise and interpretable document representations, referred to as patent portraits. Keyphrases, both present and absent, are ideal candidates for patent portraits due to their brevity, representativeness, and clarity. In this paper, we introduce KAPPA, an integrated framework designed to construct keyphrase-based patent portraits and enhance patent analysis. KAPPA operates in two phases: patent portrait construction and portrait-based analysis. To ensure effective portrait construction, we propose a semantic-calibrated keyphrase generation paradigm that integrates pre-trained language models with a prompt-based hierarchical decoding strategy to leverage the multi-level structural characteristics of patents. For portrait-based analysis, we develop a comprehensive framework that employs keyphrase-based patent portraits to enable efficient and accurate patent analysis. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets of keyphrase generation, the proposed model achieves significant improvements compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Further experiments conducted on real-world patent applications demonstrate that our keyphrase-based portraits effectively capture domain-specific knowledge and enrich semantic representation for patent analysis tasks.

Understanding and addressing corner cases is essential for ensuring the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) play a crucial role in enhancing scenario comprehension, yet they face significant challenges, such as hallucination and insufficient real-world grounding, which compromise their performance in critical driving scenarios. In this work, we propose RAC3, a novel framework designed to improve VLMs' ability to handle corner cases effectively. The framework integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to mitigate hallucination by dynamically incorporating context-specific external knowledge. A cornerstone of RAC3 is its cross-modal alignment fine-tuning, which utilizes contrastive learning to embed image-text pairs into a unified semantic space, enabling robust retrieval of similar scenarios. We evaluate RAC3 through extensive experiments using a curated dataset of corner case scenarios, demonstrating its ability to enhance semantic alignment, improve hallucination mitigation, and achieve superior performance metrics, such as Cosine Similarity and ROUGE-L scores. For example, for the LLaVA-v1.6-34B VLM, the cosine similarity between the generated text and the reference text has increased by 5.22\%. The F1-score in ROUGE-L has increased by 39.91\%, the Precision has increased by 55.80\%, and the Recall has increased by 13.74\%. This work underscores the potential of retrieval-augmented VLMs to advance the robustness and safety of autonomous driving in complex environments.

Inspired by compression works [9, 10] on BERT model in NLP domain, there are several previous studies on the distillation Self-supervised learning (SSL) has achieved great success of SSL models in speech domain [11, 12, 13, 14], in speech processing, but always with a large model size to which attempts to reduce the model size for a well-trained increase the modeling capacity. This may limit its potential SSL model in an unsupervised fashion. Most of these existing applications due to the expensive computation and memory works are investigated on the SUPERB benchmark [15], a costs introduced by the oversize model. Compression for SSL generic testing framework for pre-trained models on a range models has become an important research direction of practical of downstream tasks. The SSL models are evaluated in the value. To this end, we explore the effective distillation constrained track, where the whole upstream model is frozen, of HuBERT-based SSL models for automatic speech recognition.

In this paper, we provide a new perspective on self-supervised speech models from how the training targets are obtained. We generalize the targets extractor into Offline Targets Extractor (Off-TE) and Online Targets Extractor (On-TE). Based on this, we propose a new multi-tasking learning framework for self-supervised learning, MT4SSL, which stands for Boosting Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Integrating Multiple Targets. MT4SSL uses the K-means algorithm as an Off-TE and a teacher network without gradients as an On-TE, respectively. Our model outperforms previous SSL methods by nontrivial margins on the LibriSpeech benchmark, and is comparable to or even better than the best-performing models with fewer data. Furthermore, we find that using both Off-TE and On-TE results in better convergence in the pre-training phase. With both effectiveness and efficiency, we think doing multi-task learning on self-supervised speech models from our perspective is a promising trend.

Recent years have witnessed a boom in self-supervised learning (SSL) in various areas including speech processing. Speech based SSL models present promising performance in a range of speech related tasks. However, the training of SSL models is computationally expensive and a common practice is to fine-tune a released SSL model on the specific task. It is essential to use consistent front-end input during pre-training and fine-tuning. This consistency may introduce potential issues when the optimal front-end is not the same as that used in pre-training. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective front-end adapter to address this front-end discrepancy. By minimizing the distance between the outputs of different front-ends, the filterbank feature (Fbank) can be compatible with SSL models which are pre-trained with waveform. The experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed front-end adapter on several popular SSL models for the speech recognition task.