arXiv subjects

Canran Xiao

Publications and source records attributed to Canran Xiao.

27 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Affordance-First Decomposition for Continual Learning in Video-Language Understanding

Continual learning for video--language understanding is increasingly important as models face non-stationary data, domains, and query styles, yet prevailing solutions blur what should stay stable versus what should adapt, rely on static routing/capacity, or require replaying past videos. We aim to explicitly specify where stability lives and where plasticity should be focused under realistic memory and privacy constraints. We introduce Affordance-First Decomposition (AFD): videos are mapped to slowly varying affordance tokens that form a shared, time-aligned substrate, while a lightweight, query-routed, conflict-aware scheduler concentrates adaptation and grows capacity only when needed. The substrate is stabilized via weak alignment and teacher consistency, and training uses question-only replay. AFD achieves state-of-the-art across protocols: 51.6% average accuracy with -1.8% forgetting on domain-incremental VideoQA, ViLCo R@1@0.5 of 29.6% (MQ) and 20.7% (NLQ) with 18.4% stAP@0.25 (VQ), and 39.5% accuracy with -1.6% forgetting on time-incremental iVQA. Overall, AFD offers an explicit, interpretable split between a stable interaction-centered substrate and targeted adaptation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

GVD-TG: Topological Graph based on Fast Hierarchical GVD Sampling for Robot Exploration

Topological maps are more suitable than metric maps for robotic exploration tasks. However, real-time updating of accurate and detail-rich environmental topological maps remains a challenge. This paper presents a topological map updating method based on the Generalized Voronoi Diagram (GVD). First, the newly observed areas are denoised to avoid low-efficiency GVD nodes misleading the topological structure. Subsequently, a multi-granularity hierarchical GVD generation method is designed to control the sampling granularity at both global and local levels. This not only ensures the accuracy of the topological structure but also enhances the ability to capture detail features, reduces the probability of path backtracking, and ensures no overlap between GVDs through the maintenance of a coverage map, thereby improving GVD utilization efficiency. Second, a node clustering method with connectivity constraints and a connectivity method based on a switching mechanism are designed to avoid the generation of unreachable nodes and erroneous nodes caused by obstacle attraction. A special cache structure is used to store all connectivity information, thereby improving exploration efficiency. Finally, to address the issue of frontiers misjudgment caused by obstacles within the scope of GVD units, a frontiers extraction method based on morphological dilation is designed to effectively ensure the reachability of frontiers. On this basis, a lightweight cost function is used to assess and switch to the next viewpoint in real time. This allows the robot to quickly adjust its strategy when signs of path backtracking appear, thereby escaping the predicament and increasing exploration flexibility. And the performance of system for exploration task is verified through comparative tests with SOTA methods.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Where Culture Fades: Revealing the Cultural Gap in Text-to-Image Generation

Multilingual text-to-image (T2I) models have advanced rapidly in terms of visual realism and semantic alignment, and are now widely utilized. Yet outputs vary across cultural contexts: because language carries cultural connotations, images synthesized from multilingual prompts should preserve cross-lingual cultural consistency. We conduct a comprehensive analysis showing that current T2I models often produce culturally neutral or English-biased results under multilingual prompts. Analyses of two representative models indicate that the issue stems not from missing cultural knowledge but from insufficient activation of culture-related representations. We propose a probing method that localizes culture-sensitive signals to a small set of neurons in a few fixed layers. Guided by this finding, we introduce two complementary alignment strategies: (1) inference-time cultural activation that amplifies the identified neurons without backbone fine-tuned; and (2) layer-targeted cultural enhancement that updates only culturally relevant layers. Experiments on our CultureBench demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines in cultural consistency while preserving fidelity and diversity.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Curiosity Meets Cooperation: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Long-Tail Multi-Label Learning

Long-tail imbalance is endemic to multi-label learning: a few head labels dominate the gradient signal, while the many rare labels that matter in practice are silently ignored. We tackle this problem by casting the task as a cooperative potential game. In our Curiosity-Driven Game-Theoretic Multi-Label Learning (CD-GTMLL) framework, the label space is split among several cooperating players that share a global accuracy payoff yet earn additional curiosity rewards that rise with label rarity and inter-player disagreement. These curiosity bonuses inject gradient on under-represented tags without hand-tuned class weights. We prove that gradient best-response updates ascend a differentiable potential and converge to tail-aware stationary points that tighten a lower bound on the expected Rare-F1. Extensive experiments on conventional benchmarks and three extreme-scale datasets show consistent state-of-the-art gains, delivering up to +4.3% Rare-F1 and +1.6% P@3 over the strongest baselines, while ablations reveal emergent division of labour and faster consensus on rare classes. CD-GTMLL thus offers a principled, scalable route to long-tail robustness in multi-label prediction.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

ReviBranch: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Branch-and-Bound with Revived Trajectories

The Branch-and-bound (B&B) algorithm is the main solver for Mixed Integer Linear Programs (MILPs), where the selection of branching variable is essential to computational efficiency. However, traditional heuristics for branching often fail to generalize across heterogeneous problem instances, while existing learning-based methods such as imitation learning (IL) suffers from dependence on expert demonstration quality, and reinforcement learning (RL) struggles with limitations in sparse rewards and dynamic state representation challenges. To address these issues, we propose ReviBranch, a novel deep RL framework that constructs revived trajectories by reviving explicit historical correspondences between branching decisions and their corresponding graph states along search-tree paths. During training, ReviBranch enables agents to learn from complete structural evolution and temporal dependencies within the branching process. Additionally, we introduce an importance-weighted reward redistribution mechanism that transforms sparse terminal rewards into dense stepwise feedback, addressing the sparse reward challenge. Extensive experiments on different MILP benchmarks demonstrate that ReviBranch outperforms state-of-the-art RL methods, reducing B&B nodes by 4.0% and LP iterations by 2.2% on large-scale instances. The results highlight the robustness and generalizability of ReviBranch across heterogeneous MILP problem classes.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

DOA: A Degeneracy Optimization Agent with Adaptive Pose Compensation Capability based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

Particle filter-based 2D-SLAM is widely used in indoor localization tasks due to its efficiency. However, indoor environments such as long straight corridors can cause severe degeneracy problems in SLAM. In this paper, we use Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to train an adaptive degeneracy optimization agent (DOA) to address degeneracy problem. We propose a systematic methodology to address three critical challenges in traditional supervised learning frameworks: (1) data acquisition bottlenecks in degenerate dataset, (2) inherent quality deterioration of training samples, and (3) ambiguity in annotation protocol design. We design a specialized reward function to guide the agent in developing perception capabilities for degenerate environments. Using the output degeneracy factor as a reference weight, the agent can dynamically adjust the contribution of different sensors to pose optimization. Specifically, the observation distribution is shifted towards the motion model distribution, with the step size determined by a linear interpolation formula related to the degeneracy factor. In addition, we employ a transfer learning module to endow the agent with generalization capabilities across different environments and address the inefficiency of training in degenerate environments. Finally, we conduct ablation studies to demonstrate the rationality of our model design and the role of transfer learning. We also compare the proposed DOA with SOTA methods to prove its superior degeneracy detection and optimization capabilities across various environments.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

DepthSSC: Monocular 3D Semantic Scene Completion via Depth-Spatial Alignment and Voxel Adaptation

The task of 3D semantic scene completion using monocular cameras is gaining significant attention in the field of autonomous driving. This task aims to predict the occupancy status and semantic labels of each voxel in a 3D scene from partial image inputs. Despite numerous existing methods, many face challenges such as inaccurately predicting object shapes and misclassifying object boundaries. To address these issues, we propose DepthSSC, an advanced method for semantic scene completion using only monocular cameras. DepthSSC integrates the Spatial Transformation Graph Fusion (ST-GF) module with Geometric-Aware Voxelization (GAV), enabling dynamic adjustment of voxel resolution to accommodate the geometric complexity of 3D space. This ensures precise alignment between spatial and depth information, effectively mitigating issues such as object boundary distortion and incorrect depth perception found in previous methods. Evaluations on the SemanticKITTI and SSCBench-KITTI-360 dataset demonstrate that DepthSSC not only captures intricate 3D structural details effectively but also achieves state-of-the-art performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Swift Sampler: Efficient Learning of Sampler by 10 Parameters

Data selection is essential for training deep learning models. An effective data sampler assigns proper sampling probability for training data and helps the model converge to a good local minimum with high performance. Previous studies in data sampling are mainly based on heuristic rules or learning through a huge amount of time-consuming trials. In this paper, we propose an automatic \textbf{swift sampler} search algorithm, \textbf{SS}, to explore automatically learning effective samplers efficiently. In particular, \textbf{SS} utilizes a novel formulation to map a sampler to a low dimension of hyper-parameters and uses an approximated local minimum to quickly examine the quality of a sampler. Benefiting from its low computational expense, \textbf{SS} can be applied on large-scale data sets with high efficiency. Comprehensive experiments on various tasks demonstrate that \textbf{SS} powered sampling can achieve obvious improvements (e.g., 1.5\% on ImageNet) and transfer among different neural networks. Project page: https://github.com/Alexander-Yao/Swift-Sampler.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

HarmonicNeRF: Geometry-Informed Synthetic View Augmentation for 3D Scene Reconstruction in Driving Scenarios

In the realm of autonomous driving, achieving precise 3D reconstruction of the driving environment is critical for ensuring safety and effective navigation. Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have shown promise in creating highly detailed and accurate models of complex environments. However, the application of NeRF in autonomous driving scenarios encounters several challenges, primarily due to the sparsity of viewpoints inherent in camera trajectories and the constraints on data collection in unbounded outdoor scenes, which typically occur along predetermined paths. This limitation not only reduces the available scene information but also poses significant challenges for NeRF training, as the sparse and path-distributed observational data leads to under-representation of the scene's geometry. In this paper, we introduce HarmonicNeRF, a novel approach for outdoor self-supervised monocular scene reconstruction. HarmonicNeRF capitalizes on the strengths of NeRF and enhances surface reconstruction accuracy by augmenting the input space with geometry-informed synthetic views. This is achieved through the application of spherical harmonics to generate novel radiance values, taking into careful consideration the color observations from the limited available real-world views. Additionally, our method incorporates proxy geometry to effectively manage occlusion, generating radiance pseudo-labels that circumvent the limitations of traditional image-warping techniques, which often fail in sparse data conditions typical of autonomous driving environments. Extensive experiments conducted on the KITTI, Argoverse, and NuScenes datasets demonstrate our approach establishes new benchmarks in synthesizing novel depth views and reconstructing scenes, significantly outperforming existing methods. Project page: https://github.com/Jiawei-Yao0812/HarmonicNeRF

cs.CV↗