Universal image representations are critical in enabling real-world fine-grained and instance-level recognition applications, where objects and entities from any domain must be identified at large scale.Despite recent advances, existing methods fail to capture important domain-specific knowledge, while also ignoring differences in data distribution across different domains.This leads to a large performance gap between efficient universal solutions and expensive approaches utilising a collection of specialist models, one for each domain.In this work, we make significant strides towards closing this gap, by introducing a new learning technique, dubbed UDON (Universal Dynamic Online distillatioN).UDON employs multi-teacher distillation, where each teacher is specialized in one domain, to transfer detailed domain-specific knowledge into the student universal embedding.UDON's distillation approach is not only effective, but also very efficient, by sharing most model parameters between the student and all teachers, where all models are jointly trained in an online manner.UDON also comprises a sampling technique which adapts the training process to dynamically allocate batches to domains which are learned slower and require more frequent processing.This boosts significantly the learning of complex domains which are characterised by a large number of classes and long-tail distributions.With comprehensive experiments, we validate each component of UDON, and showcase significant improvements over the state of the art in the recent UnED benchmark.Code: https://github.com/nikosips/UDON.

UDON's distillation approach is not only effective, but also very efficient, by sharing most model

Multi-robot mapping with neural implicit representations enables the compact reconstruction of complex environments. However, it demands robustness against communication challenges like packet loss and limited bandwidth. While prior works have introduced various mechanisms to mitigate communication disruptions, performance degradation still occurs under extremely low communication success rates. This paper presents UDON, a real-time multi-agent neural implicit mapping framework that introduces a novel uncertainty-weighted distributed optimization to achieve high-quality mapping under severe communication deterioration. The uncertainty weighting prioritizes more reliable portions of the map, while the distributed optimization isolates and penalizes mapping disagreement between individual pairs of communicating agents. We conduct extensive experiments on standard benchmark datasets and real-world robot hardware. We demonstrate that UDON significantly outperforms existing baselines, maintaining high-fidelity reconstructions and consistent scene representations even under extreme communication degradation (as low as 1% success rate).

Universal image representations are critical in enabling real-world fine-grained and instance-level recognition applications, where objects and entities from any domain must be identified at large scale.Despite recent advances, existing methods fail to capture important domain-specific knowledge, while also ignoring differences in data distribution across different domains.This leads to a large performance gap between efficient universal solutions and expensive approaches utilising a collection of specialist models, one for each domain.In this work, we make significant strides towards closing this gap, by introducing a new learning technique, dubbed UDON (Universal Dynamic Online distillatioN).UDON employs multi-teacher distillation, where each teacher is specialized in one domain, to transfer detailed domain-specific knowledge into the student universal embedding.UDON's distillation approach is not only effective, but also very efficient, by sharing most model parameters between the student and all teachers, where all models are jointly trained in an online manner.UDON also comprises a sampling technique which adapts the training process to dynamically allocate batches to domains which are learned slower and require more frequent processing.This boosts significantly the learning of complex domains which are characterised by a large number of classes and long-tail distributions.With comprehensive experiments, we validate each component of UDON, and showcase significant improvements over the state of the art in the recent UnED benchmark.Code: https://github.com/nikosips/UDON.