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Yu Hu

Publications and source records attributed to Yu Hu.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Architecture-driven Shift: towards a lightweight selector for capturing the trends of logit shift

Continual Learning (CL) is a practical paradigm to utilize power of deep pre-trained neural networks, but which pre-trained model has a better ability to balance ``Plasticity-Stability", deserving to be chosen? The logit shift serves as a natural proxy because it represents the logit shift in CL scenarios. However, obtaining the logit shift requires huge computational cost, which hinders large-scale model selection. Existing theoretical analyses fail to offer an efficient alternative because of the assumption of uniform hidden layer widths, which ignores the structural heterogeneity (variable width and depth) of real-world architectures. This raises a critical question: what theoretically relationship can be identified between heterogeneous architecture and logit shift on prior tasks (that the model has been trained on)? To answer the question, we decouple logit shift into architecture dependency and data dependency to establish our framework, which reveals that the combination of two dependency, defined as Architecture-driven Shift (ADS), that can capture the logit shift tendency well computable with few data samples. Specifically, for a well-optimized model on prior tasks, higher ADS is associated with a larger logit shift after training on the current task, which derived based on three mechanistic components: (1) spectral norm scaling of weight matrix gradients with layer width, (2) the optimization path length of the new task, and (3) the asymptotic task conflict in wide networks. Extensive empirical results across more than 175 diverse architectures demonstrate a strong monotonic correlation (the weakest Spearman's $r_s=0.731$) between ADS and logit shift. Practically, we demonstrate that ADS can serve as a lightweight proxy of the expected calibration error, which is a widely used metric for reliable CL model selection, on three datasets across six scenarios.

cs.LG↗

SDG-Track: A Heterogeneous Observer-Follower Framework for High-Resolution UAV Tracking on Embedded Platforms

Real-time tracking of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on edge devices faces a fundamental resolution-speed conflict. Downsampling high-resolution imagery to standard detector input sizes causes small target features to collapse below detectable thresholds. Yet processing native 1080p frames on resource-constrained platforms yields insufficient throughput for smooth gimbal control. We propose SDG-Track, a Sparse Detection-Guided Tracker that adopts an Observer-Follower architecture to reconcile this conflict. The Observer stream runs a high-capacity detector at low frequency on the GPU to provide accurate position anchors from 1920x1080 frames. The Follower stream performs high-frequency trajectory interpolation via ROI-constrained sparse optical flow on the CPU. To handle tracking failures from occlusion or model drift caused by spectrally similar distractors, we introduce Dual-Space Recovery, a training-free re-acquisition mechanism combining color histogram matching with geometric consistency constraints. Experiments on a ground-to-air tracking station demonstrate that SDG-Track achieves 35.1 FPS system throughput while retaining 97.2\% of the frame-by-frame detection precision. The system successfully tracks agile FPV drones under real-world operational conditions on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. Our paper code is publicly available at https://github.com/Jeffry-wen/SDG-Track

cs.CV↗

UNIV: Unified Foundation Model for Infrared and Visible Modalities

Joint RGB-infrared perception is essential for achieving robustness under diverse weather and illumination conditions. Although foundation models excel within single modalities, they suffer from substantial cross-modal degradation, an issue we attribute to a pattern shortcut, i.e., a modal bias that prioritizes superficial sensor patterns over underlying semantics. To address this problem, we introduce UNIV, a Unified foundation model for Infrared and Visible modalities. At the core of UNIV lies Patch Cross-modal Contrastive Learning (PCCL), a self-supervised contrastive learning strategy that constructs a unified cross-modal feature space. PCCL employs a frozen pre-trained model to sample pseudo patch pairs based on semantic similarity, and aligns infrared-visible representations by attracting semantically related pairs while repelling unrelated ones. This process simultaneously enhances cross-modal alignment and inter-class semantic separability, guiding the model to focus on semantic structure rather than falling into pattern shortcuts. To further enable cross-modal learning, we introduce MVIP, the most comprehensive visible-infrared benchmark to date, containing 98,992 precisely aligned image pairs across diverse scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate UNIV's superior performance on infrared tasks (+1.7 mIoU for semantic segmentation and +0.7 mAP for detection), while maintaining competitive accuracy on RGB tasks.

cs.CV↗

Ground4D: Spatially-Grounded Feedforward 4D Reconstruction for Unstructured Off-Road Scenes

Feedforward Gaussian Splatting has recently emerged as an efficient paradigm for 4D reconstruction in autonomous driving. However, in unstructured off-road scenes, its performance degrades due to high-frequency geometry, ego-motion jitter, and increased non-rigid dynamics. These factors introduce conflicting Gaussian observations across timestamps, leading to either over-smoothed renderings or structural artifacts. To address this issue, we propose Ground4D, a spatially-grounded 4D feedforward framework for pose-free off-road reconstruction. The key idea is to resolve temporal conflicts through spatially localized conditioning. Specifically, we introduce voxel-grounded temporal Gaussian aggregation, which partitions the canonical Gaussian space into spatial voxels and performs query-conditioned temporal attention within each voxel. Intra-voxel softmax normalization ensures that temporal selectivity and spatial occupancy become mutually reinforcing rather than conflicting. We furthermore introduce surface normal cues as auxiliary geometric guidance to regularize the geometry of Gaussian primitives. Extensive experiments on ORAD-3D and RELLIS-3D demonstrate that Ground4D consistently outperforms existing feedforward methods in reconstruction quality and generalizes zero-shot to unseen off-road domains. Project page and code:https://github.com/wsnbws/Ground4D.

cs.CV↗

Learning Correct Behavior from Examples: Validating Sequential Execution in Autonomous Agents

As autonomous agents become increasingly sophisticated, validating their sequential behavior presents a significant challenge. Traditional testing approaches require manual specification, exact sequence matching, or thousands of training examples. We present a novel algorithm that automatically learns correct behavior from just 2-10 passing execution traces and validates new executions against this learned model. Our approach combines dominator analysis from compiler theory with multimodal large language model-powered semantic understanding to identify essential states and handle non-deterministic behavior. The system constructs a generalized ground truth model using Prefix Tree Acceptors, merges traces through multi-tiered equivalence detection, and validates new executions via topological subsequence matching. In controlled experiments, our system achieved high accuracy in detecting product bugs and false successes using only 3 training traces. This approach provides explainable validation results with coverage metrics and works across diverse domains including UI testing, code generation, and robotic processes.

cs.AI↗

Towards All-Day Perception for Off-Road Driving: A Large-Scale Multispectral Dataset and Comprehensive Benchmark

Off-road nighttime autonomous driving suffers from unreliable visible-light perception, making infrared modality crucial for accurate freespace detection. However, progress remains limited due to the scarcity of annotated infrared off-road datasets and the inter-frame inconsistencies inherent to current single-frame methods. To address these gaps, we present the IRON dataset, which, to our knowledge, is the first large-scale infrared dataset for off-road temporal freespace detection under all-day conditions, with strong support for nighttime perception. The dataset comprises 24,314 densely annotated infrared images with synchronized RGB images in diverse scenes and different light conditions. Building upon this dataset, we propose IRONet, a novel flow-free framework for temporal freespace detection that addresses inter-frame inconsistencies by aggregating historical context via a memory-attention mechanism and a carefully designed mask decoder. On our IRON dataset, IRONet achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 82.93%(+1.19%) IoU and 90.66%(+0.71%) F1 score at real-time inference. Remarkably, IRONet also exhibits robust generalization to RGB modalities on ORFD and Rellis datasets. Overall, our work establishes a foundation for reliable all-day off-road autonomous driving and future research in infrared temporal perception. The code and IRON dataset are available at https://github.com/wsnbws/IRON.

cs.CV↗

E2E-Fly: An Integrated Training-to-Deployment System for End-to-End Quadrotor Autonomy

Training and transferring learning-based policies for quadrotors from simulation to reality remains challenging due to inefficient visual rendering, physical modeling inaccuracies, unmodeled sensor discrepancies, and the absence of a unified platform integrating differentiable physics learning into end-to-end training. While recent work has demonstrated various end-to-end quadrotor control tasks, few systems provide a systematic, zero-shot transfer pipeline, hindering reproducibility and real-world deployment. To bridge this gap, we introduce E2E-Fly, an integrated framework featuring an agile quadrotor platform coupled with a full-stack training, validation, and deployment workflow. The training framework incorporates a high-performance simulator with support for differentiable physics learning and reinforcement learning, alongside structured reward design tailored to common quadrotor tasks. We further introduce a two-stage validation strategy using sim-to-sim transfer and hardware-in-the-loop testing, and deploy policies onto two physical quadrotor platforms via a dedicated low-level control interface and a comprehensive sim-to-real alignment methodology, encompassing system identification, domain randomization, latency compensation, and noise modeling. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to systematically unify differentiable physical learning with training, validation, and real-world deployment for quadrotors. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for training six end-to-end control tasks and deploy them in the real world.

cs.RO↗

Vision-Based End-to-End Learning for UAV Traversal of Irregular Gaps via Differentiable Simulation

-Navigation through narrow and irregular gaps is an essential skill in autonomous drones for applications such as inspection, search-and-rescue, and disaster response. However, traditional planning and control methods rely on explicit gap extraction and measurement, while recent end-to-end approaches often assume regularly shaped gaps, leading to poor generalization and limited practicality. In this work, we present a fully vision-based, end-to-end framework that maps depth images directly to control commands, enabling drones to traverse complex gaps within unseen environments. Operating in the Special Euclidean group SE(3), where position and orientation are tightly coupled, the framework leverages differentiable simulation, a Stop-Gradient operator, and a Bimodal Initialization Distribution to achieve stable traversal through consecutive gaps. Two auxiliary prediction modules-a gap-crossing success classifier and a traversability predictor-further enhance continuous navigation and safety. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate the approach's effectiveness, generalization capability, and practical robustness.

cs.RO↗

AVION: Aerial Vision-Language Instruction from Offline Teacher to Prompt-Tuned Network

Adapting vision-language models to remote sensing imagery remains challenging due to two key factors: limited semantic coverage in textual representations and insufficient adaptability of visual features. These issues are particularly significant in aerial scenes, which involve various visual appearances and fine-grained object distinctions. We propose AVION, a knowledge distillation framework tailored for remote sensing adaptation of vision-language models. The teacher module constructs semantically rich textual prototypes by collecting descriptions from a large language model and verifying validity using remote sensing image features. The student module integrates lightweight and learnable prompts into both vision and language encoders, guided by the teacher to align embeddings and their cross-modal relationships. Once trained, the student operates independently during inference. Experiments on six optical remote sensing benchmarks show that AVION improves few-shot classification and base-class accuracy without degrading generalization to novel categories. It also enhances mean recall for cross-modal retrieval, with minimal additional trainable parameters.

cs.CV↗

Vector Field Augmented Differentiable Policy Learning for Vision-Based Drone Racing

Autonomous drone racing in complex environments requires agile, high-speed flight while maintaining reliable obstacle avoidance. Differentiable-physics-based policy learning has recently demonstrated high sample efficiency and remarkable performance across various tasks, including agile drone flight and quadruped locomotion. However, applying such methods to drone racing remains difficult, as key objective like gate traversal are inherently hard to express as smooth, differentiable losses. To address these challenges, we propose DiffRacing, a novel vector field-augmented differentiable policy learning framework. DiffRacing integrates differentiable losses and vector fields into the training process to provide continuous and stable gradient signals, balancing obstacle avoidance and high-speed gate traversal. In addition, a differentiable Delta Action Model compensates for dynamics mismatch, enabling efficient sim-to-real transfer without explicit system identification. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that DiffRacing achieves superior sample efficiency, faster convergence, and robust flight performance, thereby demonstrating that vector fields can augment traditional gradient-based policy learning with a task-specific geometric prior.

cs.RO↗

Beyond Endpoints: Path-Centric Reasoning for Vectorized Off-Road Network Extraction

Deep learning has advanced vectorized road extraction in urban settings, yet off-road environments remain underexplored and challenging. A significant domain gap causes advanced models to fail in wild terrains due to two key issues: lack of large-scale vectorized datasets and structural weakness in prevailing methods. Models such as SAM-Road employ a node-centric paradigm that reasons at sparse endpoints, making them fragile to occlusions and ambiguous junctions in off-road scenes, leading to topological errors. This work addresses these limitations in two complementary ways. First, we release WildRoad, a global off-road road network dataset constructed efficiently with a dedicated interactive annotation tool tailored for road-network labeling. Second, we introduce MaGRoad (Mask-aware Geodesic Road network extractor), a path-centric framework that aggregates multi-scale visual evidence along candidate paths to infer connectivity robustly. Extensive experiments show that MaGRoad achieves state-of-the-art performance on our challenging WildRoad benchmark while generalizing well to urban datasets. An efficient vertex extraction strategy also yields roughly 2.5X faster inference, improving practical applicability. Together, the dataset and path-centric paradigm provide a stronger foundation for mapping roads in the wild. We release both the dataset and code at this repository. We release both the dataset and code at https://github.com/xiaofei-guan/MaGRoad.

cs.CV↗

AI-IO: An Aerodynamics-Inspired Real-Time Inertial Odometry for Quadrotors

Inertial Odometry (IO) has gained attention in quadrotor applications due to its sole reliance on inertial measurement units (IMUs), attributed to its lightweight design, low cost, and robust performance across diverse environments. However, most existing learning-based inertial odometry systems for quadrotors either use only IMU data or include additional dynamics-related inputs such as thrust, but still lack a principled formulation of the underlying physical model to be learned. This lack of interpretability hampers the model's ability to generalize and often limits its accuracy. In this work, we approach the inertial odometry learning problem from a different perspective. Inspired by the aerodynamics model and IMU measurement model, we identify the key physical quantity--rotor speed measurements required for inertial odometry and design a transformer-based inertial odometry. By incorporating rotor speed measurements, the proposed model improves velocity prediction accuracy by 36.9%. Furthermore, the transformer architecture more effectively exploits temporal dependencies for denoising and aerodynamics modeling, yielding an additional 22.4% accuracy gain over previous results. To support evaluation, we also provide a real-world quadrotor flight dataset capturing IMU measurements and rotor speed for high-speed motion. Finally, combined with an uncertainty-aware extended Kalman filter (EKF), our framework is validated across multiple datasets and real-time systems, demonstrating superior accuracy, generalization, and real-time performance. We share the code and data to promote further research (https://github.com/SJTU-ViSYS-team/AI-IO).

cs.RO↗

Curriculum Reinforcement Learning for Quadrotor Racing with Random Obstacles

Autonomous drone racing has attracted increasing interest as a research topic for exploring the limits of agile flight. However, existing studies primarily focus on obstacle-free racetracks, while the perception and dynamic challenges introduced by obstacles remain underexplored, often resulting in low success rates and limited robustness in real-world flight. To this end, we propose a novel vision-based curriculum reinforcement learning framework for training a robust controller capable of addressing unseen obstacles in drone racing. We combine multi-stage cu rriculum learning, domain randomization, and a multi-scene updating strategy to address the conflicting challenges of obstacle avoidance and gate traversal. Our end-to-end control policy is implemented as a single network, allowing high-speed flight of quadrotors in environments with variable obstacles. Both hardware-in-the-loop and real-world experiments demonstrate that our method achieves faster lap times and higher success rates than existing approaches, effectively advancing drone racing in obstacle-rich environments. The video and code are available at: https://github.com/SJTU-ViSYS-team/CRL-Drone-Racing.

cs.RO↗

Pseudo-View Enhancement via Confidence Fusion for Unposed Sparse-View Reconstruction

3D scene reconstruction under unposed sparse viewpoints is a highly challenging yet practically important problem, especially in outdoor scenes due to complex lighting and scale variation. With extremely limited input views, directly utilizing diffusion model to synthesize pseudo frames will introduce unreasonable geometry, which will harm the final reconstruction quality. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework for sparse-view outdoor reconstruction that achieves high-quality results through bidirectional pseudo frame restoration and scene perception Gaussian management. Specifically, we introduce a bidirectional pseudo frame restoration method that restores missing content by diffusion-based synthesis guided by adjacent frames with a lightweight pseudo-view deblur model and confidence mask inference algorithm. Then we propose a scene perception Gaussian management strategy that optimize Gaussians based on joint depth-density information. These designs significantly enhance reconstruction completeness, suppress floating artifacts and improve overall geometric consistency under extreme view sparsity. Experiments on outdoor benchmarks demonstrate substantial gains over existing methods in both fidelity and stability.

cs.CV↗

Towards Sample Efficient Entanglement Classification for 3 and 4 Qubit Systems: A Tailored CNN-BiLSTM Approach

Accurate classification of multipartite entanglement in high-dimensional quantum systems is crucial for advancing quantum communication and information processing. However, conventional methods are resource-intensive, and even many machine-learning-based approaches necessitate large training datasets, creating a significant experimental bottleneck for data acquisition. To address this challenge, we propose a hybrid neural network architecture integrating Convolutional and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory networks (CNN-BiLSTM). This design leverages CNNs for local feature extraction and BiLSTMs for sequential dependency modeling, enabling robust feature learning from minimal training data. We investigate two fusion paradigms: Architecture 1 (flattening-based) and Architecture 2 (dimensionality-transforming). When trained on only 100 samples, Architecture 2 maintains classification accuracies exceeding 90% for both 3-qubit and 4-qubit systems, demonstrating rapid loss convergence within tens of epochs. Under full-data conditions (400 000 samples), both architectures achieve accuracies above 99.97%. Comparative benchmarks reveal that our CNN-BiLSTM models, especially Architecture 2, consistently outperform standalone CNNs, BiLSTMs, and MLPs in low-data regimes, albeit with increased training time. These results demonstrates that the tailored CNN-BiLSTM fusion significantly alleviates experimental data acquisition burden, offering a practical pathway toward scalable entanglement verification in complex quantum systems.

quant-ph↗

SETI Observations of k-Hz Periodic Radio Signals from Five Nearby Stars with FAST at L Band

We report a radio SETI search for periodic, kHz-wide signals from five of the nearest stars observable with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). Using the 19-beam L-band receiver (1.05-1.45 GHz), we obtained 1200 s tracking observations of Groombridge 34 A/B, Ross 248, 61 Cygni B, and Ross 128. Dynamic spectra from all beams and both linear polarisations were searched channel by channel with a fast-folding algorithm sensitive to periods between 1.1 and 300 s. A multi-layer RFI-mitigation pipeline exploits multi-beam occupancy, cross-target bad-channel statistics, XX/YY polarisation coincidence, broad frequency masks, and narrow site-specific RFI exclusion zones, followed by clustering in period-frequency space. The pipeline is validated on FAST observations of PSR B0329+54, where we recover the known 0.714 s spin period and harmonic structure in the expected beam. For the stellar sample, successive cuts reduce the raw FFA hit lists (> 10^6 hits per target) to a small number of cluster-level candidates, all of which exhibit clear radio-frequency interference signatures in phase-time and phase-frequency diagnostics. We therefore report no convincing detections of periodic transmitters in our searched parameter space. Using the radiometer equation with our adopted detection threshold (S/N = 25) and assuming a duty cycle delta = 0.1, we obtain upper limits of approximately (7-9) x 10^9 W on the isotropic-equivalent EIRP of kHz-wide periodic beacons at these stars, among the most stringent constraints to date on periodic radio emission from nearby stellar systems.

astro-ph.SR↗

Autonomous Driving in Unstructured Environments: How Far Have We Come?

Research on autonomous driving in unstructured outdoor environments is less advanced than in structured urban settings due to challenges like environmental diversities and scene complexity. These environments-such as rural areas and rugged terrains-pose unique obstacles that are not common in structured urban areas. Despite these difficulties, autonomous driving in unstructured outdoor environments is crucial for applications in agriculture, mining, and military operations. Our survey reviews over 250 papers for autonomous driving in unstructured outdoor environments, covering offline mapping, pose estimation, environmental perception, path planning, end-to-end autonomous driving, datasets, and relevant challenges. We also discuss emerging trends and future research directions. This review aims to consolidate knowledge and encourage further research for autonomous driving in unstructured environments. To support ongoing work, we maintain an active repository with up-to-date literature and open-source projects at: https://github.com/chaytonmin/Survey-Autonomous-Driving-in-Unstructured-Environments.

cs.RO↗

Hovering efficiency optimization of the cycloidal propeller with end plates

Cycloidal propellers are known for their omnidirectional vectored thrust, enabling smooth transitions between hovering and forward flight, making them ideal for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. However, cycloidal propellers tend to have lower hovering efficiency compared to screw propellers. Adding end plates to the blade tips can enhance hovering efficiency by reducing blade tip vortices. But the impact of these end plates and the optimal design for cycloidal propellers incorporating them have not been thoroughly studied. This paper seeks to optimize hovering efficiency and develop design theories for cycloidal propellers with end plates. Extensive force measurement experiments are conducted to identify designs with optimal hovering efficiency. The sliding mesh technique is employed to solve the unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) equations for a detailed analysis. Experimental results indicate that the designs with end plates generally achieve significantly better hovering efficiency than those without end plates. End plates help to maintain hovering efficiency, even though the blade aspect ratio is as small as 1.5. The designs with stationary end plates are superior to those with rotating end plates because rotation introduces additional torque caused by the friction force. Designs featuring thick end plates outperform those with thin end plates, as the rounded edges can eliminate end plate vortices. The best design features stationary thick end plates, a chord-to-radius ratio of 0.65, and a large pitching amplitude of 40 degrees. It achieves a hovering efficiency of 0.72 with a blade aspect ratio of 3, which is comparable to that of helicopters. In contrast, for the cases without end plates, the highest hovering efficiency is merely 0.54.

physics.flu-dyn↗