Zhang, Zhang
HumanoidPano: Hybrid Spherical Panoramic-LiDAR Cross-Modal Perception for Humanoid Robots
Zhang, Qiang, Zhang, Zhang, Cui, Wei, Sun, Jingkai, Cao, Jiahang, Guo, Yijie, Han, Gang, Zhao, Wen, Wang, Jiaxu, Sun, Chenghao, Zhang, Lingfeng, Cheng, Hao, Chen, Yujie, Wang, Lin, Tang, Jian, Xu, Renjing
The perceptual system design for humanoid robots poses unique challenges due to inherent structural constraints that cause severe self-occlusion and limited field-of-view (FOV). We present HumanoidPano, a novel hybrid cross-modal perception framework that synergistically integrates panoramic vision and LiDAR sensing to overcome these limitations. Unlike conventional robot perception systems that rely on monocular cameras or standard multi-sensor configurations, our method establishes geometrically-aware modality alignment through a spherical vision transformer, enabling seamless fusion of 360 visual context with LiDAR's precise depth measurements. First, Spherical Geometry-aware Constraints (SGC) leverage panoramic camera ray properties to guide distortion-regularized sampling offsets for geometric alignment. Second, Spatial Deformable Attention (SDA) aggregates hierarchical 3D features via spherical offsets, enabling efficient 360{\deg}-to-BEV fusion with geometrically complete object representations. Third, Panoramic Augmentation (AUG) combines cross-view transformations and semantic alignment to enhance BEV-panoramic feature consistency during data augmentation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the 360BEV-Matterport benchmark. Real-world deployment on humanoid platforms validates the system's capability to generate accurate BEV segmentation maps through panoramic-LiDAR co-perception, directly enabling downstream navigation tasks in complex environments. Our work establishes a new paradigm for embodied perception in humanoid robotics.
Test-Time Discovery via Hashing Memory
Lyu, Fan, Liu, Tianle, Zhang, Zhang, Hu, Fuyuan, Wang, Liang
We introduce Test-Time Discovery (TTD) as a novel task that addresses class shifts during testing, requiring models to simultaneously identify emerging categories while preserving previously learned ones. A key challenge in TTD is distinguishing newly discovered classes from those already identified. To address this, we propose a training-free, hash-based memory mechanism that enhances class discovery through fine-grained comparisons with past test samples. Leveraging the characteristics of unknown classes, our approach introduces hash representation based on feature scale and directions, utilizing Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) for efficient grouping of similar samples. This enables test samples to be easily and quickly compared with relevant past instances. Furthermore, we design a collaborative classification strategy, combining a prototype classifier for known classes with an LSH-based classifier for novel ones. To enhance reliability, we incorporate a self-correction mechanism that refines memory labels through hash-based neighbor retrieval, ensuring more stable and accurate class assignments. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves good discovery of novel categories while maintaining performance on known classes, establishing a new paradigm in model testing. Our code is available at https://github.com/fanlyu/ttd.
MM-RLHF: The Next Step Forward in Multimodal LLM Alignment
Zhang, Yi-Fan, Yu, Tao, Tian, Haochen, Fu, Chaoyou, Li, Peiyan, Zeng, Jianshu, Xie, Wulin, Shi, Yang, Zhang, Huanyu, Wu, Junkang, Wang, Xue, Hu, Yibo, Wen, Bin, Yang, Fan, Zhang, Zhang, Gao, Tingting, Zhang, Di, Wang, Liang, Jin, Rong, Tan, Tieniu
Despite notable advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), most state-of-the-art models have not undergone thorough alignment with human preferences. This gap exists because current alignment research has primarily achieved progress in specific areas (e.g., hallucination reduction), while the broader question of whether aligning models with human preferences can systematically enhance MLLM capability remains largely unexplored. To this end, we introduce MM-RLHF, a dataset containing $\mathbf{120k}$ fine-grained, human-annotated preference comparison pairs. This dataset represents a substantial advancement over existing resources, offering superior size, diversity, annotation granularity, and quality. Leveraging this dataset, we propose several key innovations to improve both the quality of reward models and the efficiency of alignment algorithms. Notably, we introduce a Critique-Based Reward Model, which generates critiques of model outputs before assigning scores, offering enhanced interpretability and more informative feedback compared to traditional scalar reward mechanisms. Additionally, we propose Dynamic Reward Scaling, a method that adjusts the loss weight of each sample according to the reward signal, thereby optimizing the use of high-quality comparison pairs. Our approach is rigorously evaluated across $\mathbf{10}$ distinct dimensions and $\mathbf{27}$ benchmarks, with results demonstrating significant and consistent improvements in model performance. Specifically, fine-tuning LLaVA-ov-7B with MM-RLHF and our alignment algorithm leads to a $\mathbf{19.5}$% increase in conversational abilities and a $\mathbf{60}$% improvement in safety. We have open-sourced the preference dataset, reward model, training and evaluation code, as well as reward modeling and safety benchmarks. For more details, please visit our project page: https://mm-rlhf.github.io.
Conformal Uncertainty Indicator for Continual Test-Time Adaptation
Lyu, Fan, Zhao, Hanyu, Shi, Ziqi, Liu, Ye, Hu, Fuyuan, Zhang, Zhang, Wang, Liang
Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) aims to adapt models to sequentially changing domains during testing, relying on pseudo-labels for self-adaptation. However, incorrect pseudo-labels can accumulate, leading to performance degradation. To address this, we propose a Conformal Uncertainty Indicator (CUI) for CTTA, leveraging Conformal Prediction (CP) to generate prediction sets that include the true label with a specified coverage probability. Since domain shifts can lower the coverage than expected, making CP unreliable, we dynamically compensate for the coverage by measuring both domain and data differences. Reliable pseudo-labels from CP are then selectively utilized to enhance adaptation. Experiments confirm that CUI effectively estimates uncertainty and improves adaptation performance across various existing CTTA methods.
MCRL4OR: Multimodal Contrastive Representation Learning for Off-Road Environmental Perception
Yang, Yi, Zhang, Zhang, Wang, Liang
Most studies on environmental perception for autonomous vehicles (AVs) focus on urban traffic environments, where the objects/stuff to be perceived are mainly from man-made scenes and scalable datasets with dense annotations can be used to train supervised learning models. By contrast, it is hard to densely annotate a large-scale off-road driving dataset manually due to the inherently unstructured nature of off-road environments. In this paper, we propose a Multimodal Contrastive Representation Learning approach for Off-Road environmental perception, namely MCRL4OR. This approach aims to jointly learn three encoders for processing visual images, locomotion states, and control actions by aligning the locomotion states with the fused features of visual images and control actions within a contrastive learning framework. The causation behind this alignment strategy is that the inertial locomotion state is the result of taking a certain control action under the current landform/terrain condition perceived by visual sensors. In experiments, we pre-train the MCRL4OR with a large-scale off-road driving dataset and adopt the learned multimodal representations for various downstream perception tasks in off-road driving scenarios. The superior performance in downstream tasks demonstrates the advantages of the pre-trained multimodal representations. The codes can be found in \url{https://github.com/1uciusy/MCRL4OR}.
TimeRAF: Retrieval-Augmented Foundation model for Zero-shot Time Series Forecasting
Zhang, Huanyu, Xu, Chang, Zhang, Yi-Fan, Zhang, Zhang, Wang, Liang, Bian, Jiang, Tan, Tieniu
Time series forecasting plays a crucial role in data mining, driving rapid advancements across numerous industries. With the emergence of large models, time series foundation models (TSFMs) have exhibited remarkable generalization capabilities, such as zero-shot learning, through large-scale pre-training. Meanwhile, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods have been widely employed to enhance the performance of foundation models on unseen data, allowing models to access to external knowledge. In this paper, we introduce TimeRAF, a Retrieval-Augmented Forecasting model that enhance zero-shot time series forecasting through retrieval-augmented techniques. We develop customized time series knowledge bases that are tailored to the specific forecasting tasks. TimeRAF employs an end-to-end learnable retriever to extract valuable information from the knowledge base. Additionally, we propose Channel Prompting for knowledge integration, which effectively extracts relevant information from the retrieved knowledge along the channel dimension. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, showing significant improvement across various domains and datasets.
Instruct or Interact? Exploring and Eliciting LLMs' Capability in Code Snippet Adaptation Through Prompt Engineering
Zhang, Tanghaoran, Yu, Yue, Mao, Xinjun, Wang, Shangwen, Yang, Kang, Lu, Yao, Zhang, Zhang, Zhao, Yuxin
Code snippet adaptation is a fundamental activity in the software development process. Unlike code generation, code snippet adaptation is not a "free creation", which requires developers to tailor a given code snippet in order to fit specific requirements and the code context. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have confirmed their effectiveness in the code generation task with promising results. However, their performance on adaptation, a reuse-oriented and context-dependent code change prediction task, is still unclear. To bridge this gap, we conduct an empirical study to investigate the performance and issues of LLMs on the adaptation task. We first evaluate the adaptation performances of three popular LLMs and compare them to the code generation task. Our result indicates that their adaptation ability is weaker than generation, with a nearly 15% decrease on pass@1 and more context-related errors. By manually inspecting 200 cases, we further investigate the causes of LLMs' sub-optimal performance, which can be classified into three categories, i.e., Unclear Requirement, Requirement Misalignment and Context Misapplication. Based on the above empirical research, we propose an interactive prompting approach to eliciting LLMs' adaptation ability. Experimental result reveals that our approach greatly improve LLMs' adaptation performance. The best-performing Human-LLM interaction successfully solves 159 out of the 202 identified defects and improves the pass@1 and pass@5 by over 40% compared to the initial instruction-based prompt. Considering human efforts, we suggest multi-agent interaction as a trade-off, which can achieve comparable performance with excellent generalization ability. We deem that our approach could provide methodological assistance for autonomous code snippet reuse and adaptation with LLMs.
Minder: Faulty Machine Detection for Large-scale Distributed Model Training
Deng, Yangtao, Shi, Xiang, Jiang, Zhuo, Zhang, Xingjian, Zhang, Lei, Zhang, Zhang, Li, Bo, Song, Zuquan, Zhu, Hang, Liu, Gaohong, Li, Fuliang, Wang, Shuguang, Lin, Haibin, Ye, Jianxi, Yu, Minlan
Large-scale distributed model training requires simultaneous training on up to thousands of machines. Faulty machine detection is critical when an unexpected fault occurs in a machine. From our experience, a training task can encounter two faults per day on average, possibly leading to a halt for hours. To address the drawbacks of the time-consuming and labor-intensive manual scrutiny, we propose Minder, an automatic faulty machine detector for distributed training tasks. The key idea of Minder is to automatically and efficiently detect faulty distinctive monitoring metric patterns, which could last for a period before the entire training task comes to a halt. Minder has been deployed in our production environment for over one year, monitoring daily distributed training tasks where each involves up to thousands of machines. In our real-world fault detection scenarios, Minder can accurately and efficiently react to faults within 3.6 seconds on average, with a precision of 0.904 and F1-score of 0.893.
Love in Action: Gamifying Public Video Cameras for Fostering Social Relationships in Real World
Zhang, Zhang, Li, Da, Wu, Geng, Li, Yaoning, Sun, Xiaobing, Wang, Liang
In this paper, we create "Love in Action" (LIA), a body language-based social game utilizing video cameras installed in public spaces to enhance social relationships in real-world. In the game, participants assume dual roles, i.e., requesters, who issue social requests, and performers, who respond social requests through performing specified body languages. To mediate the communication between participants, we build an AI-enhanced video analysis system incorporating multiple visual analysis modules like person detection, attribute recognition, and action recognition, to assess the performer's body language quality. A two-week field study involving 27 participants shows significant improvements in their social friendships, as indicated by Self-reported questionnaires. Moreover, user experiences are investigated to highlight the potential of public video cameras as a novel communication medium for socializing in public spaces.
Eliminating the Language Bias for Visual Question Answering with fine-grained Causal Intervention
Liu, Ying, Bai, Ge, Lu, Chenji, Li, Shilong, Zhang, Zhang, Liu, Ruifang, Guo, Wenbin
Despite the remarkable advancements in Visual Question Answering (VQA), the challenge of mitigating the language bias introduced by textual information remains unresolved. Previous approaches capture language bias from a coarse-grained perspective. However, the finer-grained information within a sentence, such as context and keywords, can result in different biases. Due to the ignorance of fine-grained information, most existing methods fail to sufficiently capture language bias. In this paper, we propose a novel causal intervention training scheme named CIBi to eliminate language bias from a finer-grained perspective. Specifically, we divide the language bias into context bias and keyword bias. We employ causal intervention and contrastive learning to eliminate context bias and improve the multi-modal representation. Additionally, we design a new question-only branch based on counterfactual generation to distill and eliminate keyword bias. Experimental results illustrate that CIBi is applicable to various VQA models, yielding competitive performance.