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Mohammad Asiful Hossain

Publications and source records attributed to Mohammad Asiful Hossain.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

From Segments to Scenes: Temporal Understanding for Agentic Autonomous Driving via Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as the perception and reasoning backbone of autonomous agents acting in the wild, with autonomous driving (AD) being one of the most safety-critical instances. Reliable temporal understanding is essential for such agents to anticipate events, attribute causes, and act safely in dynamic environments, yet this remains a significant challenge even for state-of-the-art (SoTA) VLMs. Prior video benchmarks have emphasized other content (sports, cooking, etc.), yet no existing benchmark focuses exclusively on temporal understanding for both short- and long-form AD footage. To fill this gap, we present the Temporal Understanding in Autonomous Driving (TAD) benchmark, comprising nearly 6000 question-answer (QA) pairs across 7 tasks, and evaluate 9 closed- and open-source generalist as well as AD-specialist models. Current SoTA models perform substantially below human accuracy on TAD. To improve the temporal reasoning of VLM-based driving agents, we propose two novel training-free solutions: Scene-CoT, which uses Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, and TCogMap, which incorporates an ego-centric temporal cognitive map produced by a trajectory-analysis module that operates as an agentic tool around the VLM. Integrated with existing VLMs, our methods improve average accuracy on TAD by up to $17.72\%$ and by up to $10.35\%$ on STSBench. By introducing TAD, benchmarking SoTA models, and proposing effective enhancements, this work aims to catalyze further progress on temporal understanding for agentic AD systems operating in the wild. The benchmark and evaluation code are available at ${\href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/vbdai/TAD}{\text{Hugging Face}}}$ and ${\href{https://github.com/vbdi/tad_bench}{\text{GitHub}}}$, respectively.

cs.CV

CPPO: Contrastive Perception Policy Optimization for VLM Agents

We introduce CPPO, a Contrastive Perception Policy Optimization method for finetuning vision--language models (VLMs). Reliable perception is a core requirement for VLM-based agents that must reason and act in open-ended environments: faulty visual grounding cascades directly into faulty actions, hallucinated tool calls, and unsafe decisions. While reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly improved reasoning in language models, extending these advances to multimodal agents requires improving both perception and reasoning. Prior works address this challenge mainly through explicit perception rewards, which often require extra LLM judges, ground-truth annotations, or forced separation of perception from reasoning. CPPO addresses this limitation in a self-supervised manner by extending the RL objective with a Contrastive Perception Loss (CPL) that provides a direct learning signal for visual grounding. The contrastive objective encourages the model to become more sensitive to input visual information. To apply this signal effectively, CPPO identifies perception tokens using an entropy-shift mechanism in the model's output distributions under perturbed images and applies the contrastive loss selectively to those tokens during training. Experiments show that CPPO surpasses prior methods while avoiding extra models, making training more efficient and scalable, and yielding policies that are better suited to perception-critical agentic tasks.

cs.CV

International Workshop on Continual Semi-Supervised Learning: Introduction, Benchmarks and Baselines

The aim of this paper is to formalize a new continual semi-supervised learning (CSSL) paradigm, proposed to the attention of the machine learning community via the IJCAI 2021 International Workshop on Continual Semi-Supervised Learning (CSSL-IJCAI), with the aim of raising field awareness about this problem and mobilizing its effort in this direction. After a formal definition of continual semi-supervised learning and the appropriate training and testing protocols, the paper introduces two new benchmarks specifically designed to assess CSSL on two important computer vision tasks: activity recognition and crowd counting. We describe the Continual Activity Recognition (CAR) and Continual Crowd Counting (CCC) challenges built upon those benchmarks, the baseline models proposed for the challenges, and describe a simple CSSL baseline which consists in applying batch self-training in temporal sessions, for a limited number of rounds. The results show that learning from unlabelled data streams is extremely challenging, and stimulate the search for methods that can encode the dynamics of the data stream.

cs.CV

Crowd Counting Using Scale-Aware Attention Networks

In this paper, we consider the problem of crowd counting in images. Given an image of a crowded scene, our goal is to estimate the density map of this image, where each pixel value in the density map corresponds to the crowd density at the corresponding location in the image. Given the estimated density map, the final crowd count can be obtained by summing over all values in the density map. One challenge of crowd counting is the scale variation in images. In this work, we propose a novel scale-aware attention network to address this challenge. Using the attention mechanism popular in recent deep learning architectures, our model can automatically focus on certain global and local scales appropriate for the image. By combining these global and local scale attention, our model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods for crowd counting on several benchmark datasets.

cs.CV

An Efficient Single Chord-based Accumulation Technique (SCA) to Detect More Reliable Corners

Corner detection is a vital operation in numerous computer vision applications. The Chord-to-Point Distance Accumulation (CPDA) detector is recognized as the contour-based corner detector producing the lowest localization error while localizing corners in an image. However, in our experiment part, we demonstrate that CPDA detector often misses some potential corners. Moreover, the detection algorithm of CPDA is computationally costly. In this paper, We focus on reducing localization error as well as increasing average repeatability. The preprocessing and refinements steps of proposed process are similar to CPDA. Our experimental results will show the effectiveness and robustness of proposed process over CPDA.

cs.CV

Chord Angle Deviation using Tangent (CADT), an Efficient and Robust Contour-based Corner Detector

Detection of corner is the most essential process in a large number of computer vision and image processing applications. We have mentioned a number of popular contour-based corner detectors in our paper. Among all these detectors chord to triangular arm angle (CTAA) has been demonstrated as the most dominant corner detector in terms of average repeatability. We introduce a new effective method to calculate the value of curvature in this paper. By demonstrating experimental results, our proposed technique outperforms CTAA and other detectors mentioned in this paper. The results exhibit that our proposed method is simple yet efficient at finding out corners more accurately and reliably.

cs.CV