Search

Spurious bias, a tendency to use spurious correlations between non-essential input attributes and target variables for predictions, has revealed a severe robustness pitfall in deep learning models trained on single modality data. Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), which integrate both vision and language models, have demonstrated strong capability in joint vision-language understanding. However, whether spurious biases are prevalent in MLLMs remains under-explored. We mitigate this gap by analyzing the spurious biases in a multimodal setting, uncovering the specific test data patterns that can manifest this problem when biases in the vision model cascade into the alignment between visual and text tokens in MLLMs. To better understand this problem, we introduce MM-SpuBench, a comprehensive visual question-answering (VQA) benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs' reliance on nine distinct categories of spurious correlations from five open-source image datasets. The VQA dataset is built from human-understandable concept information (attributes). Leveraging this benchmark, we conduct a thorough evaluation of current state-of-the-art MLLMs. Our findings illuminate the persistence of the reliance on spurious correlations from these models and underscore the urge for new methodologies to mitigate spurious biases. To support the MLLM robustness research, we release our VQA benchmark at https://huggingface.co/datasets/mmbench/MM-SpuBench.

Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown great promise in language-guided perceptual tasks such as recognition, segmentation, and object detection. However, their effectiveness in addressing visual cognition problems that require high-level reasoning is not well-established. One such challenge is abstract visual reasoning (AVR) -- the cognitive ability to discern relationships among patterns in a set of images and extrapolate to predict subsequent patterns. This skill is crucial during the early neurodevelopmental stages of children. Inspired by the AVR tasks in Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), we propose a new dataset MaRs-VQA and a new benchmark VCog-Bench containing three datasets to evaluate the zero-shot AVR capability of MLLMs and compare their performance with existing human intelligent investigation. Our comparative experiments with different open-source and closed-source MLLMs on the VCog-Bench revealed a gap between MLLMs and human intelligence, highlighting the visual cognitive limitations of current MLLMs. We believe that the public release of VCog-Bench, consisting of MaRs-VQA, and the inference pipeline will drive progress toward the next generation of MLLMs with human-like visual cognition abilities., Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, the appendix will be updated soon

Safety and robustness are crucial factors in developing trustworthy autonomous vehicles. One essential aspect of addressing these factors is to equip vehicles with the capability to predict future trajectories for all moving objects in the surroundings and quantify prediction uncertainties. In this paper, we propose the Sequential Neural Variational Agent (SeNeVA), a generative model that describes the distribution of future trajectories for a single moving object. Our approach can distinguish Out-of-Distribution data while quantifying uncertainty and achieving competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on the Argoverse 2 and INTERACTION datasets. Specifically, a 0.446 meters minimum Final Displacement Error, a 0.203 meters minimum Average Displacement Error, and a 5.35% Miss Rate are achieved on the INTERACTION test set. Extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis is also provided to evaluate the proposed model. Our open-source code is available at https://github.com/PurdueDigitalTwin/seneva., Comment: Accepted at CVPR 2024

Machine learning systems are known to be sensitive to spurious correlations between non-essential features of the inputs (e.g., background, texture, and secondary objects) and the corresponding labels. These features and their correlations with the labels are known as "spurious" because they tend to change with shifts in real-world data distributions, which can negatively impact the model's generalization and robustness. In this paper, we provide a review of this issue, along with a taxonomy of current state-of-the-art methods for addressing spurious correlations in machine learning models. Additionally, we summarize existing datasets, benchmarks, and metrics to aid future research. The paper concludes with a discussion of the recent advancements and future challenges in this field, aiming to provide valuable insights for researchers in the related domains., Comment: Version 2; Github Link: https://github.com/wenqian-ye/Awesome-Spurious-Correlations

Integrating large language models (LLMs) in autonomous vehicles enables conversation with AI systems to drive the vehicle. However, it also emphasizes the requirement for such systems to comprehend commands accurately and achieve higher-level personalization to adapt to the preferences of drivers or passengers over a more extended period. In this paper, we introduce an LLM-based framework, Talk2Drive, capable of translating natural verbal commands into executable controls and learning to satisfy personal preferences for safety, efficiency, and comfort with a proposed memory module. This is the first-of-its-kind multi-scenario field experiment that deploys LLMs on a real-world autonomous vehicle. Experiments showcase that the proposed system can comprehend human intentions at different intuition levels, ranging from direct commands like "can you drive faster" to indirect commands like "I am really in a hurry now". Additionally, we use the takeover rate to quantify the trust of human drivers in the LLM-based autonomous driving system, where Talk2Drive significantly reduces the takeover rate in highway, intersection, and parking scenarios. We also validate that the proposed memory module considers personalized preferences and further reduces the takeover rate by up to 65.2% compared with those without a memory module. The experiment video can be watched at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BWsfPaq1Ro

Autonomous driving (AD) has made significant strides in recent years. However, existing frameworks struggle to interpret and execute spontaneous user instructions, such as "overtake the car ahead." Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities showing potential to bridge this gap. In this paper, we present LaMPilot, a novel framework that integrates LLMs into AD systems, enabling them to follow user instructions by generating code that leverages established functional primitives. We also introduce LaMPilot-Bench, the first benchmark dataset specifically designed to quantitatively evaluate the efficacy of language model programs in AD. Adopting the LaMPilot framework, we conduct extensive experiments to assess the performance of off-the-shelf LLMs on LaMPilot-Bench. Our results demonstrate the potential of LLMs in handling diverse driving scenarios and following user instructions in driving. To facilitate further research in this area, we release our code and data at https://github.com/PurdueDigitalTwin/LaMPilot., Comment: CVPR 2024

With the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), multimodal AI systems benefiting from large models have the potential to equally perceive the real world, make decisions, and control tools as humans. In recent months, LLMs have shown widespread attention in autonomous driving and map systems. Despite its immense potential, there is still a lack of a comprehensive understanding of key challenges, opportunities, and future endeavors to apply in LLM driving systems. In this paper, we present a systematic investigation in this field. We first introduce the background of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), the multimodal models development using LLMs, and the history of autonomous driving. Then, we overview existing MLLM tools for driving, transportation, and map systems together with existing datasets and benchmarks. Moreover, we summarized the works in The 1st WACV Workshop on Large Language and Vision Models for Autonomous Driving (LLVM-AD), which is the first workshop of its kind regarding LLMs in autonomous driving. To further promote the development of this field, we also discuss several important problems regarding using MLLMs in autonomous driving systems that need to be solved by both academia and industry.

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications have greatly enhanced the perception capabilities of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) by enabling information sharing to "see through the occlusions", resulting in significant performance improvements. However, developing and training complex multi-agent perception models from scratch can be expensive and unnecessary when existing single-agent models show remarkable generalization capabilities. In this paper, we propose a new framework termed MACP, which equips a single-agent pre-trained model with cooperation capabilities. We approach this objective by identifying the key challenges of shifting from single-agent to cooperative settings, adapting the model by freezing most of its parameters and adding a few lightweight modules. We demonstrate in our experiments that the proposed framework can effectively utilize cooperative observations and outperform other state-of-the-art approaches in both simulated and real-world cooperative perception benchmarks while requiring substantially fewer tunable parameters with reduced communication costs. Our source code is available at https://github.com/PurdueDigitalTwin/MACP., Comment: Accepted by WACV 2024, 10 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables

The fusion of human-centric design and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities has opened up new possibilities for next-generation autonomous vehicles that go beyond transportation. These vehicles can dynamically interact with passengers and adapt to their preferences. This paper proposes a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance the decision-making process in autonomous vehicles. By utilizing LLMs' linguistic and contextual understanding abilities with specialized tools, we aim to integrate the language and reasoning capabilities of LLMs into autonomous vehicles. Our research includes experiments in HighwayEnv, a collection of environments for autonomous driving and tactical decision-making tasks, to explore LLMs' interpretation, interaction, and reasoning in various scenarios. We also examine real-time personalization, demonstrating how LLMs can influence driving behaviors based on verbal commands. Our empirical results highlight the substantial advantages of utilizing chain-of-thought prompting, leading to improved driving decisions, and showing the potential for LLMs to enhance personalized driving experiences through ongoing verbal feedback. The proposed framework aims to transform autonomous vehicle operations, offering personalized support, transparent decision-making, and continuous learning to enhance safety and effectiveness. We achieve user-centric, transparent, and adaptive autonomous driving ecosystems supported by the integration of LLMs into autonomous vehicles., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2309.10228

The future of autonomous vehicles lies in the convergence of human-centric design and advanced AI capabilities. Autonomous vehicles of the future will not only transport passengers but also interact and adapt to their desires, making the journey comfortable, efficient, and pleasant. In this paper, we present a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance autonomous vehicles' decision-making processes. By integrating LLMs' natural language capabilities and contextual understanding, specialized tools usage, synergizing reasoning, and acting with various modules on autonomous vehicles, this framework aims to seamlessly integrate the advanced language and reasoning capabilities of LLMs into autonomous vehicles. The proposed framework holds the potential to revolutionize the way autonomous vehicles operate, offering personalized assistance, continuous learning, and transparent decision-making, ultimately contributing to safer and more efficient autonomous driving technologies.

Though Transformers have achieved promising results in many computer vision tasks, they tend to be over-confident in predictions, as the standard Dot Product Self-Attention (DPSA) can barely preserve distance for the unbounded input domain. In this work, we fill this gap by proposing a novel Lipschitz Regularized Transformer (LRFormer). Specifically, we present a new similarity function with the distance within Banach Space to ensure the Lipschitzness and also regularize the term by a contractive Lipschitz Bound. The proposed method is analyzed with a theoretical guarantee, providing a rigorous basis for its effectiveness and reliability. Extensive experiments conducted on standard vision benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art single forward pass approaches in prediction, calibration, and uncertainty estimation., Comment: Accepted by UAI 2023. (https://proceedings.mlr.press/v216/ye23a.html)

Sensor fusion is a crucial augmentation technique for improving the accuracy and reliability of perception systems for automated vehicles under diverse driving conditions. However, adverse weather and low-light conditions remain challenging, where sensor performance degrades significantly, exposing vehicle safety to potential risks. Advanced sensors such as LiDARs can help mitigate the issue but with extremely high marginal costs. In this paper, we propose a novel transformer-based 3D object detection model "REDFormer" to tackle low visibility conditions, exploiting the power of a more practical and cost-effective solution by leveraging bird's-eye-view camera-radar fusion. Using the nuScenes dataset with multi-radar point clouds, weather information, and time-of-day data, our model outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) models on classification and detection accuracy. Finally, we provide extensive ablation studies of each model component on their contributions to address the above-mentioned challenges. Particularly, it is shown in the experiments that our model achieves a significant performance improvement over the baseline model in low-visibility scenarios, specifically exhibiting a 31.31% increase in rainy scenes and a 46.99% enhancement in nighttime scenes.The source code of this study is publicly available.

Driver intention prediction seeks to anticipate drivers' actions by analyzing their behaviors with respect to surrounding traffic environments. Existing approaches primarily focus on late-fusion techniques, and neglect the importance of maintaining consistency between predictions and prevailing driving contexts. In this paper, we introduce a new framework called Cross-View Episodic Memory Transformer (CEMFormer), which employs spatio-temporal transformers to learn unified memory representations for an improved driver intention prediction. Specifically, we develop a spatial-temporal encoder to integrate information from both in-cabin and external camera views, along with episodic memory representations to continuously fuse historical data. Furthermore, we propose a novel context-consistency loss that incorporates driving context as an auxiliary supervision signal to improve prediction performance. Comprehensive experiments on the Brain4Cars dataset demonstrate that CEMFormer consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in driver intention prediction.

Ensuring traffic safety and preventing accidents is a critical goal in daily driving, where the advancement of computer vision technologies can be leveraged to achieve this goal. In this paper, we present a multi-view, multi-scale framework for naturalistic driving action recognition and localization in untrimmed videos, namely M$^2$DAR, with a particular focus on detecting distracted driving behaviors. Our system features a weight-sharing, multi-scale Transformer-based action recognition network that learns robust hierarchical representations. Furthermore, we propose a new election algorithm consisting of aggregation, filtering, merging, and selection processes to refine the preliminary results from the action recognition module across multiple views. Extensive experiments conducted on the 7th AI City Challenge Track 3 dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, where we achieved an overlap score of 0.5921 on the A2 test set. Our source code is available at \url{https://github.com/PurdueDigitalTwin/M2DAR}., Comment: Accepted in the 2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW)

Naturalistic driving action recognition (NDAR) has proven to be an effective method for detecting driver distraction and reducing the risk of traffic accidents. However, the intrusive design of in-cabin cameras raises concerns about driver privacy. To address this issue, we propose a novel peer-to-peer (P2P) federated learning (FL) framework with continual learning, namely FedPC, which ensures privacy and enhances learning efficiency while reducing communication, computational, and storage overheads. Our framework focuses on addressing the clients' objectives within a serverless FL framework, with the goal of delivering personalized and accurate NDAR models. We demonstrate and evaluate the performance of FedPC on two real-world NDAR datasets, including the State Farm Distracted Driver Detection and Track 3 NDAR dataset in the 2023 AICity Challenge. The results of our experiments highlight the strong competitiveness of FedPC compared to the conventional client-to-server (C2S) FLs in terms of performance, knowledge dissemination rate, and compatibility with new clients., Comment: CVPRW 2023

Ensuring traffic safety and mitigating accidents in modern driving is of paramount importance, and computer vision technologies have the potential to significantly contribute to this goal. This paper presents a multi-modal Vision Transformer for Driver Distraction Detection (termed ViT-DD), which incorporates inductive information from training signals related to both distraction detection and driver emotion recognition. Additionally, a self-learning algorithm is developed, allowing for the seamless integration of driver data without emotion labels into the multi-task training process of ViT-DD. Experimental results reveal that the proposed ViT-DD surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods for driver distraction detection by 6.5% and 0.9% on the SFDDD and AUCDD datasets, respectively., Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables

Emotion recognition in user-generated videos plays an important role in human-centered computing. Existing methods mainly employ traditional two-stage shallow pipeline, i.e. extracting visual and/or audio features and training classifiers. In this paper, we propose to recognize video emotions in an end-to-end manner based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Specifically, we develop a deep Visual-Audio Attention Network (VAANet), a novel architecture that integrates spatial, channel-wise, and temporal attentions into a visual 3D CNN and temporal attentions into an audio 2D CNN. Further, we design a special classification loss, i.e. polarity-consistent cross-entropy loss, based on the polarity-emotion hierarchy constraint to guide the attention generation. Extensive experiments conducted on the challenging VideoEmotion-8 and Ekman-6 datasets demonstrate that the proposed VAANet outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches for video emotion recognition. Our source code is released at: https://github.com/maysonma/VAANet., Comment: Accepted by AAAI 2020

Worldwide, in 2014, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these, over 600 million were obese. Accurately documenting dietary caloric intake is crucial to manage weight loss, but also presents challenges because most of the current methods for dietary assessment must rely on memory to recall foods eaten. The ultimate goal of our research is to develop computer-aided technical solutions to enhance and improve the accuracy of current measurements of dietary intake. Our proposed system in this paper aims to improve the accuracy of dietary assessment by analyzing the food images captured by mobile devices (e.g., smartphone). The key technique innovation in this paper is the deep learning-based food image recognition algorithms. Substantial research has demonstrated that digital imaging accurately estimates dietary intake in many environments and it has many advantages over other methods. However, how to derive the food information (e.g., food type and portion size) from food image effectively and efficiently remains a challenging and open research problem. We propose a new Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based food image recognition algorithm to address this problem. We applied our proposed approach to two real-world food image data sets (UEC-256 and Food-101) and achieved impressive results. To the best of our knowledge, these results outperformed all other reported work using these two data sets. Our experiments have demonstrated that the proposed approach is a promising solution for addressing the food image recognition problem. Our future work includes further improving the performance of the algorithms and integrating our system into a real-world mobile and cloud computing-based system to enhance the accuracy of current measurements of dietary intake., Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, 6 tables, ICOST 2016

The onset of several silent, chronic diseases such as diabetes can be detected only through diagnostic tests. Due to cost considerations, self-reported outcomes are routinely collected in lieu of expensive diagnostic tests in large-scale prospective investigations such as the Women's Health Initiative. However, self-reported outcomes are subject to imperfect sensitivity and specificity. Using a semiparametric likelihood-based approach, we present time to event models to estimate the association of one or more covariates with a error-prone, self-reported outcome. We present simulation studies to assess the effect of error in self-reported outcomes with regard to bias in the estimation of the regression parameter of interest. We apply the proposed methods to prospective data from 152,830 women enrolled in the Women's Health Initiative to evaluate the effect of statin use with the risk of incident diabetes mellitus among postmenopausal women. The current analysis is based on follow-up through 2010, with a median duration of follow-up of 12.1 years. The methods proposed in this paper are readily implemented using our freely available R software package icensmis, which is available at the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) website., Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/15-AOAS810 in the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)