Neural networks have significantly advanced AI applications, yet their real-world adoption remains constrained by high computational demands, hardware limitations, and accessibility challenges. In image captioning, many state-of-the-art models have achieved impressive performances while relying on resource-intensive architectures. This made them impractical for deployment on resource-constrained devices. This limitation is particularly noticeable for applications involving low-resource languages. We demonstrate the case of image captioning in Assamese language, where lack of effective, scalable systems can restrict the accessibility of AI-based solutions for native Assamese speakers. This work presents AC-Lite, a computationally efficient model for image captioning in low-resource Assamese language. AC-Lite reduces computational requirements by replacing computation-heavy visual feature extractors like FasterRCNN with lightweight ShuffleNetv2x1.5. Additionally, Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) are used as the caption decoder to further reduce computational demands and model parameters. Furthermore, the integration of bilinear attention enhances the model's overall performance. AC-Lite can operate on edge devices, thereby eliminating the need for computation on remote servers. The proposed AC-Lite model achieves 82.3 CIDEr score on the COCO-AC dataset with 1.098 GFLOPs and 25.65M parameters.

There is evidence that the driving style of an autonomous vehicle is important to increase the acceptance and trust of the passengers. The driving situation has been found to have a significant influence on human driving behavior. However, current driving style models only partially incorporate driving environment information, limiting the alignment between an agent and the given situation. Therefore, we propose a situation-aware driving style model based on different visual feature encoders pretrained on fleet data, as well as driving behavior predictors, which are adapted to the driving style of a specific driver. Our experiments show that the proposed method outperforms static driving styles significantly and forms plausible situation clusters. Furthermore, we found that feature encoders pretrained on our dataset lead to more precise driving behavior modeling. In contrast, feature encoders pretrained supervised and unsupervised on different data sources lead to more specific situation clusters, which can be utilized to constrain and control the driving style adaptation for specific situations. Moreover, in a real-world setting, where driving style adaptation is happening iteratively, we found the MLP-based behavior predictors achieve good performance initially but suffer from catastrophic forgetting. In contrast, behavior predictors based on situationdependent statistics can learn iteratively from continuous data streams by design. Overall, our experiments show that important information for driving behavior prediction is contained within the visual feature encoder. The dataset is publicly available at huggingface.co/datasets/jHaselberger/SADC-Situation-Awareness-for-Driver-Centric-Driving-Style-Adaptation.