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Dec 10

V2XPnP: Vehicle-to-Everything Spatio-Temporal Fusion for Multi-Agent Perception and Prediction

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technologies offer a promising paradigm to mitigate the limitations of constrained observability in single-vehicle systems. Prior work primarily focuses on single-frame cooperative perception, which fuses agents' information across different spatial locations but ignores temporal cues and temporal tasks (e.g., temporal perception and prediction). In this paper, we focus on the spatio-temporal fusion in V2X scenarios and design one-step and multi-step communication strategies (when to transmit) as well as examine their integration with three fusion strategies - early, late, and intermediate (what to transmit), providing comprehensive benchmarks with 11 fusion models (how to fuse). Furthermore, we propose V2XPnP, a novel intermediate fusion framework within one-step communication for end-to-end perception and prediction. Our framework employs a unified Transformer-based architecture to effectively model complex spatio-temporal relationships across multiple agents, frames, and high-definition map. Moreover, we introduce the V2XPnP Sequential Dataset that supports all V2X collaboration modes and addresses the limitations of existing real-world datasets, which are restricted to single-frame or single-mode cooperation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both perception and prediction tasks. The codebase and dataset will be released to facilitate future V2X research.

  • 14 authors
·
Dec 2, 2024

V-STaR: Benchmarking Video-LLMs on Video Spatio-Temporal Reasoning

Human processes video reasoning in a sequential spatio-temporal reasoning logic, we first identify the relevant frames ("when") and then analyse the spatial relationships ("where") between key objects, and finally leverage these relationships to draw inferences ("what"). However, can Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) also "reason through a sequential spatio-temporal logic" in videos? Existing Video-LLM benchmarks primarily focus on assessing object presence, neglecting relational reasoning. Consequently, it is difficult to measure whether a model truly comprehends object interactions (actions/events) in videos or merely relies on pre-trained "memory" of co-occurrences as biases in generating answers. In this work, we introduce a Video Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (V-STaR) benchmark to address these shortcomings. The key idea is to decompose video understanding into a Reverse Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (RSTR) task that simultaneously evaluates what objects are present, when events occur, and where they are located while capturing the underlying Chain-of-thought (CoT) logic. To support this evaluation, we construct a dataset to elicit the spatial-temporal reasoning process of Video-LLMs. It contains coarse-to-fine CoT questions generated by a semi-automated GPT-4-powered pipeline, embedding explicit reasoning chains to mimic human cognition. Experiments from 14 Video-LLMs on our V-STaR reveal significant gaps between current Video-LLMs and the needs for robust and consistent spatio-temporal reasoning.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 14 2

FutureSightDrive: Thinking Visually with Spatio-Temporal CoT for Autonomous Driving

Visual language models (VLMs) have attracted increasing interest in autonomous driving due to their powerful reasoning capabilities. However, existing VLMs typically utilize discrete text Chain-of-Thought (CoT) tailored to the current scenario, which essentially represents highly abstract and symbolic compression of visual information, potentially leading to spatio-temporal relationship ambiguity and fine-grained information loss. Is autonomous driving better modeled on real-world simulation and imagination than on pure symbolic logic? In this paper, we propose a spatio-temporal CoT reasoning method that enables models to think visually. First, VLM serves as a world model to generate unified image frame for predicting future world states: where perception results (e.g., lane divider and 3D detection) represent the future spatial relationships, and ordinary future frame represent the temporal evolution relationships. This spatio-temporal CoT then serves as intermediate reasoning steps, enabling the VLM to function as an inverse dynamics model for trajectory planning based on current observations and future predictions. To implement visual generation in VLMs, we propose a unified pretraining paradigm integrating visual generation and understanding, along with a progressive visual CoT enhancing autoregressive image generation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, advancing autonomous driving towards visual reasoning.

  • 8 authors
·
May 23

3D Dynamic Scene Graphs: Actionable Spatial Perception with Places, Objects, and Humans

We present a unified representation for actionable spatial perception: 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs. Scene graphs are directed graphs where nodes represent entities in the scene (e.g. objects, walls, rooms), and edges represent relations (e.g. inclusion, adjacency) among nodes. Dynamic scene graphs (DSGs) extend this notion to represent dynamic scenes with moving agents (e.g. humans, robots), and to include actionable information that supports planning and decision-making (e.g. spatio-temporal relations, topology at different levels of abstraction). Our second contribution is to provide the first fully automatic Spatial PerceptIon eNgine(SPIN) to build a DSG from visual-inertial data. We integrate state-of-the-art techniques for object and human detection and pose estimation, and we describe how to robustly infer object, robot, and human nodes in crowded scenes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that reconciles visual-inertial SLAM and dense human mesh tracking. Moreover, we provide algorithms to obtain hierarchical representations of indoor environments (e.g. places, structures, rooms) and their relations. Our third contribution is to demonstrate the proposed spatial perception engine in a photo-realistic Unity-based simulator, where we assess its robustness and expressiveness. Finally, we discuss the implications of our proposal on modern robotics applications. 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs can have a profound impact on planning and decision-making, human-robot interaction, long-term autonomy, and scene prediction. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/SWbofjhyPzI

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 14, 2020 1

Co-Seg++: Mutual Prompt-Guided Collaborative Learning for Versatile Medical Segmentation

Medical image analysis is critical yet challenged by the need of jointly segmenting organs or tissues, and numerous instances for anatomical structures and tumor microenvironment analysis. Existing studies typically formulated different segmentation tasks in isolation, which overlooks the fundamental interdependencies between these tasks, leading to suboptimal segmentation performance and insufficient medical image understanding. To address this issue, we propose a Co-Seg++ framework for versatile medical segmentation. Specifically, we introduce a novel co-segmentation paradigm, allowing semantic and instance segmentation tasks to mutually enhance each other. We first devise a spatio-temporal prompt encoder (STP-Encoder) to capture long-range spatial and temporal relationships between segmentation regions and image embeddings as prior spatial constraints. Moreover, we devise a multi-task collaborative decoder (MTC-Decoder) that leverages cross-guidance to strengthen the contextual consistency of both tasks, jointly computing semantic and instance segmentation masks. Extensive experiments on diverse CT and histopathology datasets demonstrate that the proposed Co-Seg++ outperforms state-of-the-arts in the semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentation of dental anatomical structures, histopathology tissues, and nuclei instances. The source code is available at https://github.com/xq141839/Co-Seg-Plus.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 20

GRIP: Generating Interaction Poses Using Latent Consistency and Spatial Cues

Hands are dexterous and highly versatile manipulators that are central to how humans interact with objects and their environment. Consequently, modeling realistic hand-object interactions, including the subtle motion of individual fingers, is critical for applications in computer graphics, computer vision, and mixed reality. Prior work on capturing and modeling humans interacting with objects in 3D focuses on the body and object motion, often ignoring hand pose. In contrast, we introduce GRIP, a learning-based method that takes, as input, the 3D motion of the body and the object, and synthesizes realistic motion for both hands before, during, and after object interaction. As a preliminary step before synthesizing the hand motion, we first use a network, ANet, to denoise the arm motion. Then, we leverage the spatio-temporal relationship between the body and the object to extract two types of novel temporal interaction cues, and use them in a two-stage inference pipeline to generate the hand motion. In the first stage, we introduce a new approach to enforce motion temporal consistency in the latent space (LTC), and generate consistent interaction motions. In the second stage, GRIP generates refined hand poses to avoid hand-object penetrations. Given sequences of noisy body and object motion, GRIP upgrades them to include hand-object interaction. Quantitative experiments and perceptual studies demonstrate that GRIP outperforms baseline methods and generalizes to unseen objects and motions from different motion-capture datasets.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 22, 2023

Text-driven Human Motion Generation with Motion Masked Diffusion Model

Text-driven human motion generation is a multimodal task that synthesizes human motion sequences conditioned on natural language. It requires the model to satisfy textual descriptions under varying conditional inputs, while generating plausible and realistic human actions with high diversity. Existing diffusion model-based approaches have outstanding performance in the diversity and multimodality of generation. However, compared to autoregressive methods that train motion encoders before inference, diffusion methods lack in fitting the distribution of human motion features which leads to an unsatisfactory FID score. One insight is that the diffusion model lack the ability to learn the motion relations among spatio-temporal semantics through contextual reasoning. To solve this issue, in this paper, we proposed Motion Masked Diffusion Model (MMDM), a novel human motion masked mechanism for diffusion model to explicitly enhance its ability to learn the spatio-temporal relationships from contextual joints among motion sequences. Besides, considering the complexity of human motion data with dynamic temporal characteristics and spatial structure, we designed two mask modeling strategies: time frames mask and body parts mask. During training, MMDM masks certain tokens in the motion embedding space. Then, the diffusion decoder is designed to learn the whole motion sequence from masked embedding in each sampling step, this allows the model to recover a complete sequence from incomplete representations. Experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML dataset demonstrate that our mask strategy is effective by balancing motion quality and text-motion consistency.

  • 1 authors
·
Sep 29, 2024

Time Blindness: Why Video-Language Models Can't See What Humans Can?

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have made impressive strides in understanding spatio-temporal relationships in videos. However, when spatial information is obscured, these models struggle to capture purely temporal patterns. We introduce SpookyBench, a benchmark where information is encoded solely in temporal sequences of noise-like frames, mirroring natural phenomena from biological signaling to covert communication. Interestingly, while humans can recognize shapes, text, and patterns in these sequences with over 98% accuracy, state-of-the-art VLMs achieve 0% accuracy. This performance gap highlights a critical limitation: an over-reliance on frame-level spatial features and an inability to extract meaning from temporal cues. Furthermore, when trained in data sets with low spatial signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), temporal understanding of models degrades more rapidly than human perception, especially in tasks requiring fine-grained temporal reasoning. Overcoming this limitation will require novel architectures or training paradigms that decouple spatial dependencies from temporal processing. Our systematic analysis shows that this issue persists across model scales and architectures. We release SpookyBench to catalyze research in temporal pattern recognition and bridge the gap between human and machine video understanding. Dataset and code has been made available on our project website: https://timeblindness.github.io/.

  • 4 authors
·
May 30 3

RiverMamba: A State Space Model for Global River Discharge and Flood Forecasting

Recent deep learning approaches for river discharge forecasting have improved the accuracy and efficiency in flood forecasting, enabling more reliable early warning systems for risk management. Nevertheless, existing deep learning approaches in hydrology remain largely confined to local-scale applications and do not leverage the inherent spatial connections of bodies of water. Thus, there is a strong need for new deep learning methodologies that are capable of modeling spatio-temporal relations to improve river discharge and flood forecasting for scientific and operational applications. To address this, we present RiverMamba, a novel deep learning model that is pretrained with long-term reanalysis data and that can forecast global river discharge and floods on a 0.05^circ grid up to 7 days lead time, which is of high relevance in early warning. To achieve this, RiverMamba leverages efficient Mamba blocks that enable the model to capture spatio-temporal relations in very large river networks and enhance its forecast capability for longer lead times. The forecast blocks integrate ECMWF HRES meteorological forecasts, while accounting for their inaccuracies through spatio-temporal modeling. Our analysis demonstrates that RiverMamba provides reliable predictions of river discharge across various flood return periods, including extreme floods, and lead times, surpassing both AI- and physics-based models. The source code and datasets are publicly available at the project page https://hakamshams.github.io/RiverMamba.

WavJourney: Compositional Audio Creation with Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great promise in integrating diverse expert models to tackle intricate language and vision tasks. Despite their significance in advancing the field of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC), their potential in intelligent audio content creation remains unexplored. In this work, we tackle the problem of creating audio content with storylines encompassing speech, music, and sound effects, guided by text instructions. We present WavJourney, a system that leverages LLMs to connect various audio models for audio content generation. Given a text description of an auditory scene, WavJourney first prompts LLMs to generate a structured script dedicated to audio storytelling. The audio script incorporates diverse audio elements, organized based on their spatio-temporal relationships. As a conceptual representation of audio, the audio script provides an interactive and interpretable rationale for human engagement. Afterward, the audio script is fed into a script compiler, converting it into a computer program. Each line of the program calls a task-specific audio generation model or computational operation function (e.g., concatenate, mix). The computer program is then executed to obtain an explainable solution for audio generation. We demonstrate the practicality of WavJourney across diverse real-world scenarios, including science fiction, education, and radio play. The explainable and interactive design of WavJourney fosters human-machine co-creation in multi-round dialogues, enhancing creative control and adaptability in audio production. WavJourney audiolizes the human imagination, opening up new avenues for creativity in multimedia content creation.

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 26, 2023 1

AirPhyNet: Harnessing Physics-Guided Neural Networks for Air Quality Prediction

Air quality prediction and modelling plays a pivotal role in public health and environment management, for individuals and authorities to make informed decisions. Although traditional data-driven models have shown promise in this domain, their long-term prediction accuracy can be limited, especially in scenarios with sparse or incomplete data and they often rely on black-box deep learning structures that lack solid physical foundation leading to reduced transparency and interpretability in predictions. To address these limitations, this paper presents a novel approach named Physics guided Neural Network for Air Quality Prediction (AirPhyNet). Specifically, we leverage two well-established physics principles of air particle movement (diffusion and advection) by representing them as differential equation networks. Then, we utilize a graph structure to integrate physics knowledge into a neural network architecture and exploit latent representations to capture spatio-temporal relationships within the air quality data. Experiments on two real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that AirPhyNet outperforms state-of-the-art models for different testing scenarios including different lead time (24h, 48h, 72h), sparse data and sudden change prediction, achieving reduction in prediction errors up to 10%. Moreover, a case study further validates that our model captures underlying physical processes of particle movement and generates accurate predictions with real physical meaning.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 6, 2024

ChangeMamba: Remote Sensing Change Detection With Spatiotemporal State Space Model

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) and Transformers have made impressive progress in the field of remote sensing change detection (CD). However, both architectures have inherent shortcomings: CNN are constrained by a limited receptive field that may hinder their ability to capture broader spatial contexts, while Transformers are computationally intensive, making them costly to train and deploy on large datasets. Recently, the Mamba architecture, based on state space models, has shown remarkable performance in a series of natural language processing tasks, which can effectively compensate for the shortcomings of the above two architectures. In this paper, we explore for the first time the potential of the Mamba architecture for remote sensing CD tasks. We tailor the corresponding frameworks, called MambaBCD, MambaSCD, and MambaBDA, for binary change detection (BCD), semantic change detection (SCD), and building damage assessment (BDA), respectively. All three frameworks adopt the cutting-edge Visual Mamba architecture as the encoder, which allows full learning of global spatial contextual information from the input images. For the change decoder, which is available in all three architectures, we propose three spatio-temporal relationship modeling mechanisms, which can be naturally combined with the Mamba architecture and fully utilize its attribute to achieve spatio-temporal interaction of multi-temporal features, thereby obtaining accurate change information. On five benchmark datasets, our proposed frameworks outperform current CNN- and Transformer-based approaches without using any complex training strategies or tricks, fully demonstrating the potential of the Mamba architecture in CD tasks. Further experiments show that our architecture is quite robust to degraded data. The source code will be available in https://github.com/ChenHongruixuan/MambaCD

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 4, 2024

Episodic Memories Generation and Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models

Episodic memory -- the ability to recall specific events grounded in time and space -- is a cornerstone of human cognition, enabling not only coherent storytelling, but also planning and decision-making. Despite their remarkable capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) lack a robust mechanism for episodic memory: we argue that integrating episodic memory capabilities into LLM is essential for advancing AI towards human-like cognition, increasing their potential to reason consistently and ground their output in real-world episodic events, hence avoiding confabulations. To address this challenge, we introduce a comprehensive framework to model and evaluate LLM episodic memory capabilities. Drawing inspiration from cognitive science, we develop a structured approach to represent episodic events, encapsulating temporal and spatial contexts, involved entities, and detailed descriptions. We synthesize a unique episodic memory benchmark, free from contamination, and release open source code and datasets to assess LLM performance across various recall and episodic reasoning tasks. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art models, including GPT-4 and Claude variants, Llama 3.1, and o1-mini, reveals that even the most advanced LLMs struggle with episodic memory tasks, particularly when dealing with multiple related events or complex spatio-temporal relationships -- even in contexts as short as 10k-100k tokens.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 20

Spatio-Temporal Context Prompting for Zero-Shot Action Detection

Spatio-temporal action detection encompasses the tasks of localizing and classifying individual actions within a video. Recent works aim to enhance this process by incorporating interaction modeling, which captures the relationship between people and their surrounding context. However, these approaches have primarily focused on fully-supervised learning, and the current limitation lies in the lack of generalization capability to recognize unseen action categories. In this paper, we aim to adapt the pretrained image-language models to detect unseen actions. To this end, we propose a method which can effectively leverage the rich knowledge of visual-language models to perform Person-Context Interaction. Meanwhile, our Context Prompting module will utilize contextual information to prompt labels, thereby enhancing the generation of more representative text features. Moreover, to address the challenge of recognizing distinct actions by multiple people at the same timestamp, we design the Interest Token Spotting mechanism which employs pretrained visual knowledge to find each person's interest context tokens, and then these tokens will be used for prompting to generate text features tailored to each individual. To evaluate the ability to detect unseen actions, we propose a comprehensive benchmark on J-HMDB, UCF101-24, and AVA datasets. The experiments show that our method achieves superior results compared to previous approaches and can be further extended to multi-action videos, bringing it closer to real-world applications. The code and data can be found in https://webber2933.github.io/ST-CLIP-project-page.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 28, 2024

Equivariant Spatio-Temporal Self-Supervision for LiDAR Object Detection

Popular representation learning methods encourage feature invariance under transformations applied at the input. However, in 3D perception tasks like object localization and segmentation, outputs are naturally equivariant to some transformations, such as rotation. Using pre-training loss functions that encourage equivariance of features under certain transformations provides a strong self-supervision signal while also retaining information of geometric relationships between transformed feature representations. This can enable improved performance in downstream tasks that are equivariant to such transformations. In this paper, we propose a spatio-temporal equivariant learning framework by considering both spatial and temporal augmentations jointly. Our experiments show that the best performance arises with a pre-training approach that encourages equivariance to translation, scaling, and flip, rotation and scene flow. For spatial augmentations, we find that depending on the transformation, either a contrastive objective or an equivariance-by-classification objective yields best results. To leverage real-world object deformations and motion, we consider sequential LiDAR scene pairs and develop a novel 3D scene flow-based equivariance objective that leads to improved performance overall. We show our pre-training method for 3D object detection which outperforms existing equivariant and invariant approaches in many settings.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 17, 2024

STAR-Bench: Probing Deep Spatio-Temporal Reasoning as Audio 4D Intelligence

Despite rapid progress in Multi-modal Large Language Models and Large Audio-Language Models, existing audio benchmarks largely test semantics that can be recovered from text captions, masking deficits in fine-grained perceptual reasoning. We formalize audio 4D intelligence that is defined as reasoning over sound dynamics in time and 3D space, and introduce STAR-Bench to measure it. STAR-Bench combines a Foundational Acoustic Perception setting (six attributes under absolute and relative regimes) with a Holistic Spatio-Temporal Reasoning setting that includes segment reordering for continuous and discrete processes and spatial tasks spanning static localization, multi-source relations, and dynamic trajectories. Our data curation pipeline uses two methods to ensure high-quality samples. For foundational tasks, we use procedurally synthesized and physics-simulated audio. For holistic data, we follow a four-stage process that includes human annotation and final selection based on human performance. Unlike prior benchmarks where caption-only answering reduces accuracy slightly, STAR-Bench induces far larger drops (-31.5\% temporal, -35.2\% spatial), evidencing its focus on linguistically hard-to-describe cues. Evaluating 19 models reveals substantial gaps compared with humans and a capability hierarchy: closed-source models are bottlenecked by fine-grained perception, while open-source models lag across perception, knowledge, and reasoning. Our STAR-Bench provides critical insights and a clear path forward for developing future models with a more robust understanding of the physical world.

ST-LINK: Spatially-Aware Large Language Models for Spatio-Temporal Forecasting

Traffic forecasting represents a crucial problem within intelligent transportation systems. In recent research, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising method, but their intrinsic design, tailored primarily for sequential token processing, introduces notable challenges in effectively capturing spatial dependencies. Specifically, the inherent limitations of LLMs in modeling spatial relationships and their architectural incompatibility with graph-structured spatial data remain largely unaddressed. To overcome these limitations, we introduce ST-LINK, a novel framework that enhances the capability of Large Language Models to capture spatio-temporal dependencies. Its key components are Spatially-Enhanced Attention (SE-Attention) and the Memory Retrieval Feed-Forward Network (MRFFN). SE-Attention extends rotary position embeddings to integrate spatial correlations as direct rotational transformations within the attention mechanism. This approach maximizes spatial learning while preserving the LLM's inherent sequential processing structure. Meanwhile, MRFFN dynamically retrieves and utilizes key historical patterns to capture complex temporal dependencies and improve the stability of long-term forecasting. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that ST-LINK surpasses conventional deep learning and LLM approaches, and effectively captures both regular traffic patterns and abrupt changes.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 17 1

UniMTS: Unified Pre-training for Motion Time Series

Motion time series collected from mobile and wearable devices such as smartphones and smartwatches offer significant insights into human behavioral patterns, with wide applications in healthcare, automation, IoT, and AR/XR due to their low-power, always-on nature. However, given security and privacy concerns, building large-scale motion time series datasets remains difficult, preventing the development of pre-trained models for human activity analysis. Typically, existing models are trained and tested on the same dataset, leading to poor generalizability across variations in device location, device mounting orientation and human activity type. In this paper, we introduce UniMTS, the first unified pre-training procedure for motion time series that generalizes across diverse device latent factors and activities. Specifically, we employ a contrastive learning framework that aligns motion time series with text descriptions enriched by large language models. This helps the model learn the semantics of time series to generalize across activities. Given the absence of large-scale motion time series data, we derive and synthesize time series from existing motion skeleton data with all-joint coverage. Spatio-temporal graph networks are utilized to capture the relationships across joints for generalization across different device locations. We further design rotation-invariant augmentation to make the model agnostic to changes in device mounting orientations. Our model shows exceptional generalizability across 18 motion time series classification benchmark datasets, outperforming the best baselines by 340% in the zero-shot setting, 16.3% in the few-shot setting, and 9.2% in the full-shot setting.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 18, 2024

Video-Panda: Parameter-efficient Alignment for Encoder-free Video-Language Models

We present an efficient encoder-free approach for video-language understanding that achieves competitive performance while significantly reducing computational overhead. Current video-language models typically rely on heavyweight image encoders (300M-1.1B parameters) or video encoders (1B-1.4B parameters), creating a substantial computational burden when processing multi-frame videos. Our method introduces a novel Spatio-Temporal Alignment Block (STAB) that directly processes video inputs without requiring pre-trained encoders while using only 45M parameters for visual processing - at least a 6.5times reduction compared to traditional approaches. The STAB architecture combines Local Spatio-Temporal Encoding for fine-grained feature extraction, efficient spatial downsampling through learned attention and separate mechanisms for modeling frame-level and video-level relationships. Our model achieves comparable or superior performance to encoder-based approaches for open-ended video question answering on standard benchmarks. The fine-grained video question-answering evaluation demonstrates our model's effectiveness, outperforming the encoder-based approaches Video-ChatGPT and Video-LLaVA in key aspects like correctness and temporal understanding. Extensive ablation studies validate our architectural choices and demonstrate the effectiveness of our spatio-temporal modeling approach while achieving 3-4times faster processing speeds than previous methods. Code is available at https://github.com/jh-yi/Video-Panda.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 24, 2024 2

MAMo: Leveraging Memory and Attention for Monocular Video Depth Estimation

We propose MAMo, a novel memory and attention frame-work for monocular video depth estimation. MAMo can augment and improve any single-image depth estimation networks into video depth estimation models, enabling them to take advantage of the temporal information to predict more accurate depth. In MAMo, we augment model with memory which aids the depth prediction as the model streams through the video. Specifically, the memory stores learned visual and displacement tokens of the previous time instances. This allows the depth network to cross-reference relevant features from the past when predicting depth on the current frame. We introduce a novel scheme to continuously update the memory, optimizing it to keep tokens that correspond with both the past and the present visual information. We adopt attention-based approach to process memory features where we first learn the spatio-temporal relation among the resultant visual and displacement memory tokens using self-attention module. Further, the output features of self-attention are aggregated with the current visual features through cross-attention. The cross-attended features are finally given to a decoder to predict depth on the current frame. Through extensive experiments on several benchmarks, including KITTI, NYU-Depth V2, and DDAD, we show that MAMo consistently improves monocular depth estimation networks and sets new state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy. Notably, our MAMo video depth estimation provides higher accuracy with lower latency, when omparing to SOTA cost-volume-based video depth models.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 26, 2023

SemanticFormer: Holistic and Semantic Traffic Scene Representation for Trajectory Prediction using Knowledge Graphs

Trajectory prediction in autonomous driving relies on accurate representation of all relevant contexts of the driving scene, including traffic participants, road topology, traffic signs, as well as their semantic relations to each other. Despite increased attention to this issue, most approaches in trajectory prediction do not consider all of these factors sufficiently. We present SemanticFormer, an approach for predicting multimodal trajectories by reasoning over a semantic traffic scene graph using a hybrid approach. It utilizes high-level information in the form of meta-paths, i.e. trajectories on which an agent is allowed to drive from a knowledge graph which is then processed by a novel pipeline based on multiple attention mechanisms to predict accurate trajectories. SemanticFormer comprises a hierarchical heterogeneous graph encoder to capture spatio-temporal and relational information across agents as well as between agents and road elements. Further, it includes a predictor to fuse different encodings and decode trajectories with probabilities. Finally, a refinement module assesses permitted meta-paths of trajectories and speed profiles to obtain final predicted trajectories. Evaluation of the nuScenes benchmark demonstrates improved performance compared to several SOTA methods. In addition, we demonstrate that our knowledge graph can be easily added to two graph-based existing SOTA methods, namely VectorNet and Laformer, replacing their original homogeneous graphs. The evaluation results suggest that by adding our knowledge graph the performance of the original methods is enhanced by 5% and 4%, respectively.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 30, 2024

ReKep: Spatio-Temporal Reasoning of Relational Keypoint Constraints for Robotic Manipulation

Representing robotic manipulation tasks as constraints that associate the robot and the environment is a promising way to encode desired robot behaviors. However, it remains unclear how to formulate the constraints such that they are 1) versatile to diverse tasks, 2) free of manual labeling, and 3) optimizable by off-the-shelf solvers to produce robot actions in real-time. In this work, we introduce Relational Keypoint Constraints (ReKep), a visually-grounded representation for constraints in robotic manipulation. Specifically, ReKep is expressed as Python functions mapping a set of 3D keypoints in the environment to a numerical cost. We demonstrate that by representing a manipulation task as a sequence of Relational Keypoint Constraints, we can employ a hierarchical optimization procedure to solve for robot actions (represented by a sequence of end-effector poses in SE(3)) with a perception-action loop at a real-time frequency. Furthermore, in order to circumvent the need for manual specification of ReKep for each new task, we devise an automated procedure that leverages large vision models and vision-language models to produce ReKep from free-form language instructions and RGB-D observations. We present system implementations on a wheeled single-arm platform and a stationary dual-arm platform that can perform a large variety of manipulation tasks, featuring multi-stage, in-the-wild, bimanual, and reactive behaviors, all without task-specific data or environment models. Website at https://rekep-robot.github.io/.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 3, 2024

SPMTrack: Spatio-Temporal Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning with Mixture of Experts for Scalable Visual Tracking

Most state-of-the-art trackers adopt one-stream paradigm, using a single Vision Transformer for joint feature extraction and relation modeling of template and search region images. However, relation modeling between different image patches exhibits significant variations. For instance, background regions dominated by target-irrelevant information require reduced attention allocation, while foreground, particularly boundary areas, need to be be emphasized. A single model may not effectively handle all kinds of relation modeling simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel tracker called SPMTrack based on mixture-of-experts tailored for visual tracking task (TMoE), combining the capability of multiple experts to handle diverse relation modeling more flexibly. Benefiting from TMoE, we extend relation modeling from image pairs to spatio-temporal context, further improving tracking accuracy with minimal increase in model parameters. Moreover, we employ TMoE as a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, substantially reducing trainable parameters, which enables us to train SPMTrack of varying scales efficiently and preserve the generalization ability of pretrained models to achieve superior performance. We conduct experiments on seven datasets, and experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art trackers. The source code is available at https://github.com/WenRuiCai/SPMTrack.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 24

VideoREPA: Learning Physics for Video Generation through Relational Alignment with Foundation Models

Recent advancements in text-to-video (T2V) diffusion models have enabled high-fidelity and realistic video synthesis. However, current T2V models often struggle to generate physically plausible content due to their limited inherent ability to accurately understand physics. We found that while the representations within T2V models possess some capacity for physics understanding, they lag significantly behind those from recent video self-supervised learning methods. To this end, we propose a novel framework called VideoREPA, which distills physics understanding capability from video understanding foundation models into T2V models by aligning token-level relations. This closes the physics understanding gap and enable more physics-plausible generation. Specifically, we introduce the Token Relation Distillation (TRD) loss, leveraging spatio-temporal alignment to provide soft guidance suitable for finetuning powerful pre-trained T2V models, a critical departure from prior representation alignment (REPA) methods. To our knowledge, VideoREPA is the first REPA method designed for finetuning T2V models and specifically for injecting physical knowledge. Empirical evaluations show that VideoREPA substantially enhances the physics commonsense of baseline method, CogVideoX, achieving significant improvement on relevant benchmarks and demonstrating a strong capacity for generating videos consistent with intuitive physics. More video results are available at https://videorepa.github.io/.

  • 7 authors
·
May 29 2

SportsHHI: A Dataset for Human-Human Interaction Detection in Sports Videos

Video-based visual relation detection tasks, such as video scene graph generation, play important roles in fine-grained video understanding. However, current video visual relation detection datasets have two main limitations that hinder the progress of research in this area. First, they do not explore complex human-human interactions in multi-person scenarios. Second, the relation types of existing datasets have relatively low-level semantics and can be often recognized by appearance or simple prior information, without the need for detailed spatio-temporal context reasoning. Nevertheless, comprehending high-level interactions between humans is crucial for understanding complex multi-person videos, such as sports and surveillance videos. To address this issue, we propose a new video visual relation detection task: video human-human interaction detection, and build a dataset named SportsHHI for it. SportsHHI contains 34 high-level interaction classes from basketball and volleyball sports. 118,075 human bounding boxes and 50,649 interaction instances are annotated on 11,398 keyframes. To benchmark this, we propose a two-stage baseline method and conduct extensive experiments to reveal the key factors for a successful human-human interaction detector. We hope that SportsHHI can stimulate research on human interaction understanding in videos and promote the development of spatio-temporal context modeling techniques in video visual relation detection.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 6, 2024 1

Video-LMM Post-Training: A Deep Dive into Video Reasoning with Large Multimodal Models

Video understanding represents the most challenging frontier in computer vision, requiring models to reason about complex spatiotemporal relationships, long-term dependencies, and multimodal evidence. The recent emergence of Video-Large Multimodal Models (Video-LMMs), which integrate visual encoders with powerful decoder-based language models, has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in video understanding tasks. However, the critical phase that transforms these models from basic perception systems into sophisticated reasoning engines, post-training, remains fragmented across the literature. This survey provides the first comprehensive examination of post-training methodologies for Video-LMMs, encompassing three fundamental pillars: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with chain-of-thought, reinforcement learning (RL) from verifiable objectives, and test-time scaling (TTS) through enhanced inference computation. We present a structured taxonomy that clarifies the roles, interconnections, and video-specific adaptations of these techniques, addressing unique challenges such as temporal localization, spatiotemporal grounding, long video efficiency, and multimodal evidence integration. Through systematic analysis of representative methods, we synthesize key design principles, insights, and evaluation protocols while identifying critical open challenges in reward design, scalability, and cost-performance optimization. We further curate essential benchmarks, datasets, and metrics to facilitate rigorous assessment of post-training effectiveness. This survey aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a unified framework for advancing Video-LMM capabilities. Additional resources and updates are maintained at: https://github.com/yunlong10/Awesome-Video-LMM-Post-Training

SocialNav-SUB: Benchmarking VLMs for Scene Understanding in Social Robot Navigation

Robot navigation in dynamic, human-centered environments requires socially-compliant decisions grounded in robust scene understanding. Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit promising capabilities such as object recognition, common-sense reasoning, and contextual understanding-capabilities that align with the nuanced requirements of social robot navigation. However, it remains unclear whether VLMs can accurately understand complex social navigation scenes (e.g., inferring the spatial-temporal relations among agents and human intentions), which is essential for safe and socially compliant robot navigation. While some recent works have explored the use of VLMs in social robot navigation, no existing work systematically evaluates their ability to meet these necessary conditions. In this paper, we introduce the Social Navigation Scene Understanding Benchmark (SocialNav-SUB), a Visual Question Answering (VQA) dataset and benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs for scene understanding in real-world social robot navigation scenarios. SocialNav-SUB provides a unified framework for evaluating VLMs against human and rule-based baselines across VQA tasks requiring spatial, spatiotemporal, and social reasoning in social robot navigation. Through experiments with state-of-the-art VLMs, we find that while the best-performing VLM achieves an encouraging probability of agreeing with human answers, it still underperforms simpler rule-based approach and human consensus baselines, indicating critical gaps in social scene understanding of current VLMs. Our benchmark sets the stage for further research on foundation models for social robot navigation, offering a framework to explore how VLMs can be tailored to meet real-world social robot navigation needs. An overview of this paper along with the code and data can be found at https://larg.github.io/socialnav-sub .

  • 9 authors
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Sep 10

Long-RVOS: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Long-term Referring Video Object Segmentation

Referring video object segmentation (RVOS) aims to identify, track and segment the objects in a video based on language descriptions, which has received great attention in recent years. However, existing datasets remain focus on short video clips within several seconds, with salient objects visible in most frames. To advance the task towards more practical scenarios, we introduce Long-RVOS, a large-scale benchmark for long-term referring video object segmentation. Long-RVOS contains 2,000+ videos of an average duration exceeding 60 seconds, covering a variety of objects that undergo occlusion, disappearance-reappearance and shot changing. The objects are manually annotated with three different types of descriptions to individually evaluate the understanding of static attributes, motion patterns and spatiotemporal relationships. Moreover, unlike previous benchmarks that rely solely on the per-frame spatial evaluation, we introduce two new metrics to assess the temporal and spatiotemporal consistency. We benchmark 6 state-of-the-art methods on Long-RVOS. The results show that current approaches struggle severely with the long-video challenges. To address this, we further propose ReferMo, a promising baseline method that integrates motion information to expand the temporal receptive field, and employs a local-to-global architecture to capture both short-term dynamics and long-term dependencies. Despite simplicity, ReferMo achieves significant improvements over current methods in long-term scenarios. We hope that Long-RVOS and our baseline can drive future RVOS research towards tackling more realistic and long-form videos.

  • 7 authors
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May 19

Multi-Temporal Relationship Inference in Urban Areas

Finding multiple temporal relationships among locations can benefit a bunch of urban applications, such as dynamic offline advertising and smart public transport planning. While some efforts have been made on finding static relationships among locations, little attention is focused on studying time-aware location relationships. Indeed, abundant location-based human activities are time-varying and the availability of these data enables a new paradigm for understanding the dynamic relationships in a period among connective locations. To this end, we propose to study a new problem, namely multi-Temporal relationship inference among locations (Trial for short), where the major challenge is how to integrate dynamic and geographical influence under the relationship sparsity constraint. Specifically, we propose a solution to Trial with a graph learning scheme, which includes a spatially evolving graph neural network (SEENet) with two collaborative components: spatially evolving graph convolution module (SEConv) and spatially evolving self-supervised learning strategy (SE-SSL). SEConv performs the intra-time aggregation and inter-time propagation to capture the multifaceted spatially evolving contexts from the view of location message passing. In addition, SE-SSL designs time-aware self-supervised learning tasks in a global-local manner with additional evolving constraint to enhance the location representation learning and further handle the relationship sparsity. Finally, experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over several state-of-the-art approaches.

  • 6 authors
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Jun 15, 2023

Interactive Spatiotemporal Token Attention Network for Skeleton-based General Interactive Action Recognition

Recognizing interactive action plays an important role in human-robot interaction and collaboration. Previous methods use late fusion and co-attention mechanism to capture interactive relations, which have limited learning capability or inefficiency to adapt to more interacting entities. With assumption that priors of each entity are already known, they also lack evaluations on a more general setting addressing the diversity of subjects. To address these problems, we propose an Interactive Spatiotemporal Token Attention Network (ISTA-Net), which simultaneously model spatial, temporal, and interactive relations. Specifically, our network contains a tokenizer to partition Interactive Spatiotemporal Tokens (ISTs), which is a unified way to represent motions of multiple diverse entities. By extending the entity dimension, ISTs provide better interactive representations. To jointly learn along three dimensions in ISTs, multi-head self-attention blocks integrated with 3D convolutions are designed to capture inter-token correlations. When modeling correlations, a strict entity ordering is usually irrelevant for recognizing interactive actions. To this end, Entity Rearrangement is proposed to eliminate the orderliness in ISTs for interchangeable entities. Extensive experiments on four datasets verify the effectiveness of ISTA-Net by outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Necolizer/ISTA-Net

SunYatsen Sun Yat-Sen University
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Jul 14, 2023

VideoFactory: Swap Attention in Spatiotemporal Diffusions for Text-to-Video Generation

We present VideoFactory, an innovative framework for generating high-quality open-domain videos. VideoFactory excels in producing high-definition (1376x768), widescreen (16:9) videos without watermarks, creating an engaging user experience. Generating videos guided by text instructions poses significant challenges, such as modeling the complex relationship between space and time, and the lack of large-scale text-video paired data. Previous approaches extend pretrained text-to-image generation models by adding temporal 1D convolution/attention modules for video generation. However, these approaches overlook the importance of jointly modeling space and time, inevitably leading to temporal distortions and misalignment between texts and videos. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that strengthens the interaction between spatial and temporal perceptions. In particular, we utilize a swapped cross-attention mechanism in 3D windows that alternates the "query" role between spatial and temporal blocks, enabling mutual reinforcement for each other. To fully unlock model capabilities for high-quality video generation, we curate a large-scale video dataset called HD-VG-130M. This dataset comprises 130 million text-video pairs from the open-domain, ensuring high-definition, widescreen and watermark-free characters. Objective metrics and user studies demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of per-frame quality, temporal correlation, and text-video alignment, with clear margins.

  • 7 authors
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May 18, 2023

Benchmarking Spatiotemporal Reasoning in LLMs and Reasoning Models: Capabilities and Challenges

Spatiotemporal reasoning plays a key role in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Despite advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), their capacity to reason about complex spatiotemporal signals remains underexplored. This paper proposes a hierarchical SpatioTemporal reAsoning benchmaRK, STARK, to systematically evaluate LLMs across three levels of reasoning complexity: state estimation (e.g., predicting field variables, localizing and tracking events in space and time), spatiotemporal reasoning over states (e.g., inferring spatial-temporal relationships), and world-knowledge-aware reasoning that integrates contextual and domain knowledge (e.g., intent prediction, landmark-aware navigation). We curate 26 distinct spatiotemporal tasks with diverse sensor modalities, comprising 14,552 challenges where models answer directly or by Python Code Interpreter. Evaluating 3 LRMs and 8 LLMs, we find LLMs achieve limited success in tasks requiring geometric reasoning (e.g., multilateration or triangulation), particularly as complexity increases. Surprisingly, LRMs show robust performance across tasks with various levels of difficulty, often competing or surpassing traditional first-principle-based methods. Our results show that in reasoning tasks requiring world knowledge, the performance gap between LLMs and LRMs narrows, with some LLMs even surpassing LRMs. However, the LRM o3 model continues to achieve leading performance across all evaluated tasks, a result attributed primarily to the larger size of the reasoning models. STARK motivates future innovations in model architectures and reasoning paradigms for intelligent CPS by providing a structured framework to identify limitations in the spatiotemporal reasoning of LLMs and LRMs.

  • 5 authors
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May 16

SuperFlow++: Enhanced Spatiotemporal Consistency for Cross-Modal Data Pretraining

LiDAR representation learning has emerged as a promising approach to reducing reliance on costly and labor-intensive human annotations. While existing methods primarily focus on spatial alignment between LiDAR and camera sensors, they often overlook the temporal dynamics critical for capturing motion and scene continuity in driving scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose SuperFlow++, a novel framework that integrates spatiotemporal cues in both pretraining and downstream tasks using consecutive LiDAR-camera pairs. SuperFlow++ introduces four key components: (1) a view consistency alignment module to unify semantic information across camera views, (2) a dense-to-sparse consistency regularization mechanism to enhance feature robustness across varying point cloud densities, (3) a flow-based contrastive learning approach that models temporal relationships for improved scene understanding, and (4) a temporal voting strategy that propagates semantic information across LiDAR scans to improve prediction consistency. Extensive evaluations on 11 heterogeneous LiDAR datasets demonstrate that SuperFlow++ outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse tasks and driving conditions. Furthermore, by scaling both 2D and 3D backbones during pretraining, we uncover emergent properties that provide deeper insights into developing scalable 3D foundation models. With strong generalizability and computational efficiency, SuperFlow++ establishes a new benchmark for data-efficient LiDAR-based perception in autonomous driving. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Xiangxu-0103/SuperFlow

  • 8 authors
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Mar 25

ST-VLM: Kinematic Instruction Tuning for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Spatio-temporal reasoning is essential in understanding real-world environments in various fields, eg, autonomous driving and sports analytics. Recent advances have improved the spatial reasoning ability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) by introducing large-scale data, but these models still struggle to analyze kinematic elements like traveled distance and speed of moving objects. To bridge this gap, we construct a spatio-temporal reasoning dataset and benchmark involving kinematic instruction tuning, referred to as STKit and STKit-Bench. They consist of real-world videos with 3D annotations, detailing object motion dynamics: traveled distance, speed, movement direction, inter-object distance comparisons, and relative movement direction. To further scale such data construction to videos without 3D labels, we propose an automatic pipeline to generate pseudo-labels using 4D reconstruction in real-world scale. With our kinematic instruction tuning data for spatio-temporal reasoning, we present ST-VLM, a VLM enhanced for spatio-temporal reasoning, which exhibits outstanding performance on STKit-Bench. Furthermore, we show that ST-VLM generalizes robustly across diverse domains and tasks, outperforming baselines on other spatio-temporal benchmarks (eg, ActivityNet, TVQA+). Finally, by integrating learned spatio-temporal reasoning with existing abilities, ST-VLM enables complex multi-step reasoning. Project page: https://ikodoh.github.io/ST-VLM.

  • 7 authors
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Mar 25 1

OpenSTL: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Spatio-Temporal Predictive Learning

Spatio-temporal predictive learning is a learning paradigm that enables models to learn spatial and temporal patterns by predicting future frames from given past frames in an unsupervised manner. Despite remarkable progress in recent years, a lack of systematic understanding persists due to the diverse settings, complex implementation, and difficult reproducibility. Without standardization, comparisons can be unfair and insights inconclusive. To address this dilemma, we propose OpenSTL, a comprehensive benchmark for spatio-temporal predictive learning that categorizes prevalent approaches into recurrent-based and recurrent-free models. OpenSTL provides a modular and extensible framework implementing various state-of-the-art methods. We conduct standard evaluations on datasets across various domains, including synthetic moving object trajectory, human motion, driving scenes, traffic flow and weather forecasting. Based on our observations, we provide a detailed analysis of how model architecture and dataset properties affect spatio-temporal predictive learning performance. Surprisingly, we find that recurrent-free models achieve a good balance between efficiency and performance than recurrent models. Thus, we further extend the common MetaFormers to boost recurrent-free spatial-temporal predictive learning. We open-source the code and models at https://github.com/chengtan9907/OpenSTL.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 19, 2023

KFFocus: Highlighting Keyframes for Enhanced Video Understanding

Recently, with the emergence of large language models, multimodal LLMs have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in image and video modalities. Despite advancements in video comprehension, the substantial computational demands of long video sequences lead current video LLMs (Vid-LLMs) to employ compression strategies at both the inter-frame level (e.g., uniform sampling of video frames) and intra-frame level (e.g., condensing all visual tokens of each frame into a limited number). However, this approach often neglects the uneven temporal distribution of critical information across frames, risking the omission of keyframes that contain essential temporal and semantic details. To tackle these challenges, we propose KFFocus, a method designed to efficiently compress video tokens and emphasize the informative context present within video frames. We substitute uniform sampling with a refined approach inspired by classic video compression principles to identify and capture keyframes based on their temporal redundancy. By assigning varying condensation ratios to frames based on their contextual relevance, KFFocus efficiently reduces token redundancy while preserving informative content details. Additionally, we introduce a spatiotemporal modeling module that encodes both the temporal relationships between video frames and the spatial structure within each frame, thus providing Vid-LLMs with a nuanced understanding of spatial-temporal dynamics. Extensive experiments on widely recognized video understanding benchmarks, especially long video scenarios, demonstrate that KFFocus significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving substantial computational efficiency and enhanced accuracy.

  • 4 authors
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Aug 12

Stockformer: A Price-Volume Factor Stock Selection Model Based on Wavelet Transform and Multi-Task Self-Attention Networks

As the Chinese stock market continues to evolve and its market structure grows increasingly complex, traditional quantitative trading methods are facing escalating challenges. Particularly, due to policy uncertainty and the frequent market fluctuations triggered by sudden economic events, existing models often struggle to accurately predict market dynamics. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Stockformer, a price-volume factor stock selection model that integrates wavelet transformation and a multitask self-attention network, aimed at enhancing responsiveness and predictive accuracy regarding market instabilities. Through discrete wavelet transform, Stockformer decomposes stock returns into high and low frequencies, meticulously capturing long-term market trends and short-term fluctuations, including abrupt events. Moreover, the model incorporates a Dual-Frequency Spatiotemporal Encoder and graph embedding techniques to effectively capture complex temporal and spatial relationships among stocks. Employing a multitask learning strategy, it simultaneously predicts stock returns and directional trends. Experimental results show that Stockformer outperforms existing advanced methods on multiple real stock market datasets. In strategy backtesting, Stockformer consistently demonstrates exceptional stability and reliability across market conditions-whether rising, falling, or fluctuating-particularly maintaining high performance during downturns or volatile periods, indicating a high adaptability to market fluctuations. To foster innovation and collaboration in the financial analysis sector, the Stockformer model's code has been open-sourced and is available on the GitHub repository: https://github.com/Eric991005/Multitask-Stockformer.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 22, 2023

End-to-End Multi-Person Pose Estimation with Pose-Aware Video Transformer

Existing multi-person video pose estimation methods typically adopt a two-stage pipeline: detecting individuals in each frame, followed by temporal modeling for single-person pose estimation. This design relies on heuristic operations such as detection, RoI cropping, and non-maximum suppression (NMS), limiting both accuracy and efficiency. In this paper, we present a fully end-to-end framework for multi-person 2D pose estimation in videos, effectively eliminating heuristic operations. A key challenge is to associate individuals across frames under complex and overlapping temporal trajectories. To address this, we introduce a novel Pose-Aware Video transformEr Network (PAVE-Net), which features a spatial encoder to model intra-frame relations and a spatiotemporal pose decoder to capture global dependencies across frames. To achieve accurate temporal association, we propose a pose-aware attention mechanism that enables each pose query to selectively aggregate features corresponding to the same individual across consecutive frames.Additionally, we explicitly model spatiotemporal dependencies among pose keypoints to improve accuracy. Notably, our approach is the first end-to-end method for multi-frame 2D human pose estimation.Extensive experiments show that PAVE-Net substantially outperforms prior image-based end-to-end methods, achieving a 6.0 mAP improvement on PoseTrack2017, and delivers accuracy competitive with state-of-the-art two-stage video-based approaches, while offering significant gains in efficiency.Project page: https://github.com/zgspose/PAVENet

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 17

Spatial-Temporal Transformer Networks for Traffic Flow Forecasting

Traffic forecasting has emerged as a core component of intelligent transportation systems. However, timely accurate traffic forecasting, especially long-term forecasting, still remains an open challenge due to the highly nonlinear and dynamic spatial-temporal dependencies of traffic flows. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm of Spatial-Temporal Transformer Networks (STTNs) that leverages dynamical directed spatial dependencies and long-range temporal dependencies to improve the accuracy of long-term traffic forecasting. Specifically, we present a new variant of graph neural networks, named spatial transformer, by dynamically modeling directed spatial dependencies with self-attention mechanism to capture realtime traffic conditions as well as the directionality of traffic flows. Furthermore, different spatial dependency patterns can be jointly modeled with multi-heads attention mechanism to consider diverse relationships related to different factors (e.g. similarity, connectivity and covariance). On the other hand, the temporal transformer is utilized to model long-range bidirectional temporal dependencies across multiple time steps. Finally, they are composed as a block to jointly model the spatial-temporal dependencies for accurate traffic prediction. Compared to existing works, the proposed model enables fast and scalable training over a long range spatial-temporal dependencies. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves competitive results compared with the state-of-the-arts, especially forecasting long-term traffic flows on real-world PeMS-Bay and PeMSD7(M) datasets.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 9, 2020 1

How Different from the Past? Spatio-Temporal Time Series Forecasting with Self-Supervised Deviation Learning

Spatio-temporal forecasting is essential for real-world applications such as traffic management and urban computing. Although recent methods have shown improved accuracy, they often fail to account for dynamic deviations between current inputs and historical patterns. These deviations contain critical signals that can significantly affect model performance. To fill this gap, we propose ST-SSDL, a Spatio-Temporal time series forecasting framework that incorporates a Self-Supervised Deviation Learning scheme to capture and utilize such deviations. ST-SSDL anchors each input to its historical average and discretizes the latent space using learnable prototypes that represent typical spatio-temporal patterns. Two auxiliary objectives are proposed to refine this structure: a contrastive loss that enhances inter-prototype discriminability and a deviation loss that regularizes the distance consistency between input representations and corresponding prototypes to quantify deviation. Optimized jointly with the forecasting objective, these components guide the model to organize its hidden space and improve generalization across diverse input conditions. Experiments on six benchmark datasets show that ST-SSDL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple metrics. Visualizations further demonstrate its ability to adaptively respond to varying levels of deviation in complex spatio-temporal scenarios. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Jimmy-7664/ST-SSDL.

  • 6 authors
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Oct 6

DropletVideo: A Dataset and Approach to Explore Integral Spatio-Temporal Consistent Video Generation

Spatio-temporal consistency is a critical research topic in video generation. A qualified generated video segment must ensure plot plausibility and coherence while maintaining visual consistency of objects and scenes across varying viewpoints. Prior research, especially in open-source projects, primarily focuses on either temporal or spatial consistency, or their basic combination, such as appending a description of a camera movement after a prompt without constraining the outcomes of this movement. However, camera movement may introduce new objects to the scene or eliminate existing ones, thereby overlaying and affecting the preceding narrative. Especially in videos with numerous camera movements, the interplay between multiple plots becomes increasingly complex. This paper introduces and examines integral spatio-temporal consistency, considering the synergy between plot progression and camera techniques, and the long-term impact of prior content on subsequent generation. Our research encompasses dataset construction through to the development of the model. Initially, we constructed a DropletVideo-10M dataset, which comprises 10 million videos featuring dynamic camera motion and object actions. Each video is annotated with an average caption of 206 words, detailing various camera movements and plot developments. Following this, we developed and trained the DropletVideo model, which excels in preserving spatio-temporal coherence during video generation. The DropletVideo dataset and model are accessible at https://dropletx.github.io.

Narrative-of-Thought: Improving Temporal Reasoning of Large Language Models via Recounted Narratives

Reasoning about time and temporal relations is an integral aspect of human cognition, essential for perceiving the world and navigating our experiences. Though large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in many reasoning tasks, temporal reasoning remains challenging due to its intrinsic complexity. In this work, we first study an essential task of temporal reasoning -- temporal graph generation, to unveil LLMs' inherent, global reasoning capabilities. We show that this task presents great challenges even for the most powerful LLMs, such as GPT-3.5/4. We also notice a significant performance gap by small models (<10B) that lag behind LLMs by 50%. Next, we study how to close this gap with a budget constraint, e.g., not using model finetuning. We propose a new prompting technique tailored for temporal reasoning, Narrative-of-Thought (NoT), that first converts the events set to a Python class, then prompts a small model to generate a temporally grounded narrative, guiding the final generation of a temporal graph. Extensive experiments showcase the efficacy of NoT in improving various metrics. Notably, NoT attains the highest F1 on the Schema-11 evaluation set, while securing an overall F1 on par with GPT-3.5. NoT also achieves the best structural similarity across the board, even compared with GPT-3.5/4. Our code is available at https://github.com/launchnlp/NoT.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024 1

Pay Attention to Evolution: Time Series Forecasting with Deep Graph-Evolution Learning

Time-series forecasting is one of the most active research topics in artificial intelligence. Applications in real-world time series should consider two factors for achieving reliable predictions: modeling dynamic dependencies among multiple variables and adjusting the model's intrinsic hyperparameters. A still open gap in that literature is that statistical and ensemble learning approaches systematically present lower predictive performance than deep learning methods. They generally disregard the data sequence aspect entangled with multivariate data represented in more than one time series. Conversely, this work presents a novel neural network architecture for time-series forecasting that combines the power of graph evolution with deep recurrent learning on distinct data distributions; we named our method Recurrent Graph Evolution Neural Network (ReGENN). The idea is to infer multiple multivariate relationships between co-occurring time-series by assuming that the temporal data depends not only on inner variables and intra-temporal relationships (i.e., observations from itself) but also on outer variables and inter-temporal relationships (i.e., observations from other-selves). An extensive set of experiments was conducted comparing ReGENN with dozens of ensemble methods and classical statistical ones, showing sound improvement of up to 64.87% over the competing algorithms. Furthermore, we present an analysis of the intermediate weights arising from ReGENN, showing that by looking at inter and intra-temporal relationships simultaneously, time-series forecasting is majorly improved if paying attention to how multiple multivariate data synchronously evolve.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 28, 2020

Graph Deep Learning for Time Series Forecasting

Graph-based deep learning methods have become popular tools to process collections of correlated time series. Differently from traditional multivariate forecasting methods, neural graph-based predictors take advantage of pairwise relationships by conditioning forecasts on a (possibly dynamic) graph spanning the time series collection. The conditioning can take the form of an architectural inductive bias on the neural forecasting architecture, resulting in a family of deep learning models called spatiotemporal graph neural networks. Such relational inductive biases enable the training of global forecasting models on large time-series collections, while at the same time localizing predictions w.r.t. each element in the set (i.e., graph nodes) by accounting for local correlations among them (i.e., graph edges). Indeed, recent theoretical and practical advances in graph neural networks and deep learning for time series forecasting make the adoption of such processing frameworks appealing and timely. However, most of the studies in the literature focus on proposing variations of existing neural architectures by taking advantage of modern deep learning practices, while foundational and methodological aspects have not been subject to systematic investigation. To fill the gap, this paper aims to introduce a comprehensive methodological framework that formalizes the forecasting problem and provides design principles for graph-based predictive models and methods to assess their performance. At the same time, together with an overview of the field, we provide design guidelines, recommendations, and best practices, as well as an in-depth discussion of open challenges and future research directions.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 24, 2023

Trace Anything: Representing Any Video in 4D via Trajectory Fields

Effective spatio-temporal representation is fundamental to modeling, understanding, and predicting dynamics in videos. The atomic unit of a video, the pixel, traces a continuous 3D trajectory over time, serving as the primitive element of dynamics. Based on this principle, we propose representing any video as a Trajectory Field: a dense mapping that assigns a continuous 3D trajectory function of time to each pixel in every frame. With this representation, we introduce Trace Anything, a neural network that predicts the entire trajectory field in a single feed-forward pass. Specifically, for each pixel in each frame, our model predicts a set of control points that parameterizes a trajectory (i.e., a B-spline), yielding its 3D position at arbitrary query time instants. We trained the Trace Anything model on large-scale 4D data, including data from our new platform, and our experiments demonstrate that: (i) Trace Anything achieves state-of-the-art performance on our new benchmark for trajectory field estimation and performs competitively on established point-tracking benchmarks; (ii) it offers significant efficiency gains thanks to its one-pass paradigm, without requiring iterative optimization or auxiliary estimators; and (iii) it exhibits emergent abilities, including goal-conditioned manipulation, motion forecasting, and spatio-temporal fusion. Project page: https://trace-anything.github.io/.

Strefer: Empowering Video LLMs with Space-Time Referring and Reasoning via Synthetic Instruction Data

Next-generation AI companions must go beyond general video understanding to resolve spatial and temporal references in dynamic, real-world environments. Existing Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs), while capable of coarse-level comprehension, struggle with fine-grained, spatiotemporal reasoning, especially when user queries rely on time-based event references for temporal anchoring, or gestural cues for spatial anchoring to clarify object references and positions. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce Strefer, a synthetic instruction data generation framework designed to equip Video LLMs with spatiotemporal referring and reasoning capabilities. Strefer produces diverse instruction-tuning data using a data engine that pseudo-annotates temporally dense, fine-grained video metadata, capturing rich spatial and temporal information in a structured manner, including subjects, objects, their locations as masklets, and their action descriptions and timelines. Our approach enhances the ability of Video LLMs to interpret spatial and temporal references, fostering more versatile, space-time-aware reasoning essential for real-world AI companions. Without using proprietary models, costly human annotation, or the need to annotate large volumes of new videos, experimental evaluations show that models trained with data produced by Strefer outperform baselines on tasks requiring spatial and temporal disambiguation. Additionally, these models exhibit enhanced space-time-aware reasoning, establishing a new foundation for perceptually grounded, instruction-tuned Video LLMs.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 3

Convolutional State Space Models for Long-Range Spatiotemporal Modeling

Effectively modeling long spatiotemporal sequences is challenging due to the need to model complex spatial correlations and long-range temporal dependencies simultaneously. ConvLSTMs attempt to address this by updating tensor-valued states with recurrent neural networks, but their sequential computation makes them slow to train. In contrast, Transformers can process an entire spatiotemporal sequence, compressed into tokens, in parallel. However, the cost of attention scales quadratically in length, limiting their scalability to longer sequences. Here, we address the challenges of prior methods and introduce convolutional state space models (ConvSSM) that combine the tensor modeling ideas of ConvLSTM with the long sequence modeling approaches of state space methods such as S4 and S5. First, we demonstrate how parallel scans can be applied to convolutional recurrences to achieve subquadratic parallelization and fast autoregressive generation. We then establish an equivalence between the dynamics of ConvSSMs and SSMs, which motivates parameterization and initialization strategies for modeling long-range dependencies. The result is ConvS5, an efficient ConvSSM variant for long-range spatiotemporal modeling. ConvS5 significantly outperforms Transformers and ConvLSTM on a long horizon Moving-MNIST experiment while training 3X faster than ConvLSTM and generating samples 400X faster than Transformers. In addition, ConvS5 matches or exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art methods on challenging DMLab, Minecraft and Habitat prediction benchmarks and enables new directions for modeling long spatiotemporal sequences.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 30, 2023

UniTS: Unified Time Series Generative Model for Remote Sensing

One of the primary objectives of satellite remote sensing is to capture the complex dynamics of the Earth environment, which encompasses tasks such as reconstructing continuous cloud-free time series images, detecting land cover changes, and forecasting future surface evolution. However, existing methods typically require specialized models tailored to different tasks, lacking unified modeling of spatiotemporal features across multiple time series tasks. In this paper, we propose a Unified Time Series Generative Model (UniTS), a general framework applicable to various time series tasks, including time series reconstruction, time series cloud removal, time series semantic change detection, and time series forecasting. Based on the flow matching generative paradigm, UniTS constructs a deterministic evolution path from noise to targets under the guidance of task-specific conditions, achieving unified modeling of spatiotemporal representations for multiple tasks. The UniTS architecture consists of a diffusion transformer with spatio-temporal blocks, where we design an Adaptive Condition Injector (ACor) to enhance the model's conditional perception of multimodal inputs, enabling high-quality controllable generation. Additionally, we design a Spatiotemporal-aware Modulator (STM) to improve the ability of spatio-temporal blocks to capture complex spatiotemporal dependencies. Furthermore, we construct two high-quality multimodal time series datasets, TS-S12 and TS-S12CR, filling the gap of benchmark datasets for time series cloud removal and forecasting tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniTS exhibits exceptional generative and cognitive capabilities in both low-level and high-level time series tasks. It significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly when facing challenges such as severe cloud contamination, modality absence, and forecasting phenological variations.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 4

SURPRISE3D: A Dataset for Spatial Understanding and Reasoning in Complex 3D Scenes

The integration of language and 3D perception is critical for embodied AI and robotic systems to perceive, understand, and interact with the physical world. Spatial reasoning, a key capability for understanding spatial relationships between objects, remains underexplored in current 3D vision-language research. Existing datasets often mix semantic cues (e.g., object name) with spatial context, leading models to rely on superficial shortcuts rather than genuinely interpreting spatial relationships. To address this gap, we introduce Surprise3D, a novel dataset designed to evaluate language-guided spatial reasoning segmentation in complex 3D scenes. Surprise3D consists of more than 200k vision language pairs across 900+ detailed indoor scenes from ScanNet++ v2, including more than 2.8k unique object classes. The dataset contains 89k+ human-annotated spatial queries deliberately crafted without object name, thereby mitigating shortcut biases in spatial understanding. These queries comprehensively cover various spatial reasoning skills, such as relative position, narrative perspective, parametric perspective, and absolute distance reasoning. Initial benchmarks demonstrate significant challenges for current state-of-the-art expert 3D visual grounding methods and 3D-LLMs, underscoring the necessity of our dataset and the accompanying 3D Spatial Reasoning Segmentation (3D-SRS) benchmark suite. Surprise3D and 3D-SRS aim to facilitate advancements in spatially aware AI, paving the way for effective embodied interaction and robotic planning. The code and datasets can be found in https://github.com/liziwennba/SUPRISE.

  • 9 authors
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Jul 10

Graph-based Multi-ODE Neural Networks for Spatio-Temporal Traffic Forecasting

There is a recent surge in the development of spatio-temporal forecasting models in the transportation domain. Long-range traffic forecasting, however, remains a challenging task due to the intricate and extensive spatio-temporal correlations observed in traffic networks. Current works primarily rely on road networks with graph structures and learn representations using graph neural networks (GNNs), but this approach suffers from over-smoothing problem in deep architectures. To tackle this problem, recent methods introduced the combination of GNNs with residual connections or neural ordinary differential equations (ODE). However, current graph ODE models face two key limitations in feature extraction: (1) they lean towards global temporal patterns, overlooking local patterns that are important for unexpected events; and (2) they lack dynamic semantic edges in their architectural design. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture called Graph-based Multi-ODE Neural Networks (GRAM-ODE) which is designed with multiple connective ODE-GNN modules to learn better representations by capturing different views of complex local and global dynamic spatio-temporal dependencies. We also add some techniques like shared weights and divergence constraints into the intermediate layers of distinct ODE-GNN modules to further improve their communication towards the forecasting task. Our extensive set of experiments conducted on six real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of GRAM-ODE compared with state-of-the-art baselines as well as the contribution of different components to the overall performance. The code is available at https://github.com/zbliu98/GRAM-ODE

  • 3 authors
·
May 29, 2023

Sparse Diffusion Autoencoder for Test-time Adapting Prediction of Complex Systems

Predicting the behavior of complex systems is critical in many scientific and engineering domains, and hinges on the model's ability to capture their underlying dynamics. Existing methods encode the intrinsic dynamics of high-dimensional observations through latent representations and predict autoregressively. However, these latent representations lose the inherent spatial structure of spatiotemporal dynamics, leading to the predictor's inability to effectively model spatial interactions and neglect emerging dynamics during long-term prediction. In this work, we propose SparseDiff, introducing a test-time adaptation strategy to dynamically update the encoding scheme to accommodate emergent spatiotemporal structures during the long-term evolution of the system. Specifically, we first design a codebook-based sparse encoder, which coarsens the continuous spatial domain into a sparse graph topology. Then, we employ a graph neural ordinary differential equation to model the dynamics and guide a diffusion decoder for reconstruction. SparseDiff autoregressively predicts the spatiotemporal evolution and adjust the sparse topological structure to adapt to emergent spatiotemporal patterns by adaptive re-encoding. Extensive evaluations on representative systems demonstrate that SparseDiff achieves an average prediction error reduction of 49.99\% compared to baselines, requiring only 1\% of the spatial resolution.

  • 4 authors
·
May 23

STD-PLM: Understanding Both Spatial and Temporal Properties of Spatial-Temporal Data with PLM

Spatial-temporal forecasting and imputation are important for real-world intelligent systems. Most existing methods are tailored for individual forecasting or imputation tasks but are not designed for both. Additionally, they are less effective for zero-shot and few-shot learning. While pre-trained language model (PLM) have exhibited strong pattern recognition and reasoning abilities across various tasks, including few-shot and zero-shot learning, their applications in spatial-temporal data understanding has been constrained by insufficient modeling of complex correlations such as the temporal correlations, spatial connectivity, non-pairwise and high-order spatial-temporal correlations within data. In this paper, we propose STD-PLM for understanding both spatial and temporal properties of Spatial-Temporal Data with PLM, which is capable of implementing both spatial-temporal forecasting and imputation tasks. STD-PLM understands spatial-temporal correlations via explicitly designed spatial and temporal tokenizers. Topology-aware node embeddings are designed for PLM to comprehend and exploit the topology structure of data in inductive manner. Furthermore, to mitigate the efficiency issues introduced by the PLM, we design a sandglass attention module (SGA) combined with a specific constrained loss function, which significantly improves the model's efficiency while ensuring performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STD-PLM exhibits competitive performance and generalization capabilities across the forecasting and imputation tasks on various datasets. Moreover, STD-PLM achieves promising results on both few-shot and zero-shot tasks.The code is made available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/STD-PLM-F3BA{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/STD-PLM-F3BA}

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 12, 2024

Disentangling Spatial and Temporal Learning for Efficient Image-to-Video Transfer Learning

Recently, large-scale pre-trained language-image models like CLIP have shown extraordinary capabilities for understanding spatial contents, but naively transferring such models to video recognition still suffers from unsatisfactory temporal modeling capabilities. Existing methods insert tunable structures into or in parallel with the pre-trained model, which either requires back-propagation through the whole pre-trained model and is thus resource-demanding, or is limited by the temporal reasoning capability of the pre-trained structure. In this work, we present DiST, which disentangles the learning of spatial and temporal aspects of videos. Specifically, DiST uses a dual-encoder structure, where a pre-trained foundation model acts as the spatial encoder, and a lightweight network is introduced as the temporal encoder. An integration branch is inserted between the encoders to fuse spatio-temporal information. The disentangled spatial and temporal learning in DiST is highly efficient because it avoids the back-propagation of massive pre-trained parameters. Meanwhile, we empirically show that disentangled learning with an extra network for integration benefits both spatial and temporal understanding. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that DiST delivers better performance than existing state-of-the-art methods by convincing gaps. When pre-training on the large-scale Kinetics-710, we achieve 89.7% on Kinetics-400 with a frozen ViT-L model, which verifies the scalability of DiST. Codes and models can be found in https://github.com/alibaba-mmai-research/DiST.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 14, 2023

Effect Heterogeneity with Earth Observation in Randomized Controlled Trials: Exploring the Role of Data, Model, and Evaluation Metric Choice

Many social and environmental phenomena are associated with macroscopic changes in the built environment, captured by satellite imagery on a global scale and with daily temporal resolution. While widely used for prediction, these images and especially image sequences remain underutilized for causal inference, especially in the context of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), where causal identification is established by design. In this paper, we develop and compare a set of general tools for analyzing Conditional Average Treatment Effects (CATEs) from temporal satellite data that can be applied to any RCT where geographical identifiers are available. Through a simulation study, we analyze different modeling strategies for estimating CATE in sequences of satellite images. We find that image sequence representation models with more parameters generally yield a greater ability to detect heterogeneity. To explore the role of model and data choice in practice, we apply the approaches to two influential RCTs -- Banerjee et al. (2015), a poverty study in Cusco, Peru, and Bolsen et al. (2014), a water conservation experiment in Georgia, USA. We benchmark our image sequence models against image-only, tabular-only, and combined image-tabular data sources, summarizing practical implications for investigators in a multivariate analysis. Land cover classifications over satellite images facilitate interpretation of what image features drive heterogeneity. We also show robustness to data and model choice of satellite-based generalization of the RCT results to larger geographical areas outside the original. Overall, this paper shows how satellite sequence data can be incorporated into the analysis of RCTs, and provides evidence about the implications of data, model, and evaluation metric choice for causal analysis.

Benchmarking Spatial Relationships in Text-to-Image Generation

Spatial understanding is a fundamental aspect of computer vision and integral for human-level reasoning about images, making it an important component for grounded language understanding. While recent text-to-image synthesis (T2I) models have shown unprecedented improvements in photorealism, it is unclear whether they have reliable spatial understanding capabilities. We investigate the ability of T2I models to generate correct spatial relationships among objects and present VISOR, an evaluation metric that captures how accurately the spatial relationship described in text is generated in the image. To benchmark existing models, we introduce a dataset, SR_{2D}, that contains sentences describing two or more objects and the spatial relationships between them. We construct an automated evaluation pipeline to recognize objects and their spatial relationships, and employ it in a large-scale evaluation of T2I models. Our experiments reveal a surprising finding that, although state-of-the-art T2I models exhibit high image quality, they are severely limited in their ability to generate multiple objects or the specified spatial relations between them. Our analyses demonstrate several biases and artifacts of T2I models such as the difficulty with generating multiple objects, a bias towards generating the first object mentioned, spatially inconsistent outputs for equivalent relationships, and a correlation between object co-occurrence and spatial understanding capabilities. We conduct a human study that shows the alignment between VISOR and human judgement about spatial understanding. We offer the SR_{2D} dataset and the VISOR metric to the community in support of T2I reasoning research.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 20, 2022

Spatial-Temporal Knowledge Distillation for Takeaway Recommendation

The takeaway recommendation system aims to recommend users' future takeaway purchases based on their historical purchase behaviors, thereby improving user satisfaction and boosting merchant sales. Existing methods focus on incorporating auxiliary information or leveraging knowledge graphs to alleviate the sparsity issue of user purchase sequences. However, two main challenges limit the performance of these approaches: (1) capturing dynamic user preferences on complex geospatial information and (2) efficiently integrating spatial-temporal knowledge from both graphs and sequence data with low computational costs. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial-temporal knowledge distillation model for takeaway recommendation (STKDRec) based on the two-stage training process. Specifically, during the first pre-training stage, a spatial-temporal knowledge graph (STKG) encoder is trained to extract high-order spatial-temporal dependencies and collaborative associations from the STKG. During the second spatial-temporal knowledge distillation (STKD) stage, a spatial-temporal Transformer (ST-Transformer) is employed to comprehensively model dynamic user preferences on various types of fine-grained geospatial information from a sequential perspective. Furthermore, the STKD strategy is introduced to transfer graph-based spatial-temporal knowledge to the ST-Transformer, facilitating the adaptive fusion of rich knowledge derived from both the STKG and sequence data while reducing computational overhead. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that STKDRec significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 21, 2024

Spatially-Aware Transformer for Embodied Agents

Episodic memory plays a crucial role in various cognitive processes, such as the ability to mentally recall past events. While cognitive science emphasizes the significance of spatial context in the formation and retrieval of episodic memory, the current primary approach to implementing episodic memory in AI systems is through transformers that store temporally ordered experiences, which overlooks the spatial dimension. As a result, it is unclear how the underlying structure could be extended to incorporate the spatial axis beyond temporal order alone and thereby what benefits can be obtained. To address this, this paper explores the use of Spatially-Aware Transformer models that incorporate spatial information. These models enable the creation of place-centric episodic memory that considers both temporal and spatial dimensions. Adopting this approach, we demonstrate that memory utilization efficiency can be improved, leading to enhanced accuracy in various place-centric downstream tasks. Additionally, we propose the Adaptive Memory Allocator, a memory management method based on reinforcement learning that aims to optimize efficiency of memory utilization. Our experiments demonstrate the advantages of our proposed model in various environments and across multiple downstream tasks, including prediction, generation, reasoning, and reinforcement learning. The source code for our models and experiments will be available at https://github.com/junmokane/spatially-aware-transformer.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 23, 2024

A Survey of Reasoning and Agentic Systems in Time Series with Large Language Models

Time series reasoning treats time as a first-class axis and incorporates intermediate evidence directly into the answer. This survey defines the problem and organizes the literature by reasoning topology with three families: direct reasoning in one step, linear chain reasoning with explicit intermediates, and branch-structured reasoning that explores, revises, and aggregates. The topology is crossed with the main objectives of the field, including traditional time series analysis, explanation and understanding, causal inference and decision making, and time series generation, while a compact tag set spans these axes and captures decomposition and verification, ensembling, tool use, knowledge access, multimodality, agent loops, and LLM alignment regimes. Methods and systems are reviewed across domains, showing what each topology enables and where it breaks down in faithfulness or robustness, along with curated datasets, benchmarks, and resources that support study and deployment (https://github.com/blacksnail789521/Time-Series-Reasoning-Survey). Evaluation practices that keep evidence visible and temporally aligned are highlighted, and guidance is distilled on matching topology to uncertainty, grounding with observable artifacts, planning for shift and streaming, and treating cost and latency as design budgets. We emphasize that reasoning structures must balance capacity for grounding and self-correction against computational cost and reproducibility, while future progress will likely depend on benchmarks that tie reasoning quality to utility and on closed-loop testbeds that trade off cost and risk under shift-aware, streaming, and long-horizon settings. Taken together, these directions mark a shift from narrow accuracy toward reliability at scale, enabling systems that not only analyze but also understand, explain, and act on dynamic worlds with traceable evidence and credible outcomes.

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 15

DynST: Dynamic Sparse Training for Resource-Constrained Spatio-Temporal Forecasting

The ever-increasing sensor service, though opening a precious path and providing a deluge of earth system data for deep-learning-oriented earth science, sadly introduce a daunting obstacle to their industrial level deployment. Concretely, earth science systems rely heavily on the extensive deployment of sensors, however, the data collection from sensors is constrained by complex geographical and social factors, making it challenging to achieve comprehensive coverage and uniform deployment. To alleviate the obstacle, traditional approaches to sensor deployment utilize specific algorithms to design and deploy sensors. These methods dynamically adjust the activation times of sensors to optimize the detection process across each sub-region. Regrettably, formulating an activation strategy generally based on historical observations and geographic characteristics, which make the methods and resultant models were neither simple nor practical. Worse still, the complex technical design may ultimately lead to a model with weak generalizability. In this paper, we introduce for the first time the concept of spatio-temporal data dynamic sparse training and are committed to adaptively, dynamically filtering important sensor distributions. To our knowledge, this is the first proposal (termed DynST) of an industry-level deployment optimization concept at the data level. However, due to the existence of the temporal dimension, pruning of spatio-temporal data may lead to conflicts at different timestamps. To achieve this goal, we employ dynamic merge technology, along with ingenious dimensional mapping to mitigate potential impacts caused by the temporal aspect. During the training process, DynST utilize iterative pruning and sparse training, repeatedly identifying and dynamically removing sensor perception areas that contribute the least to future predictions.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 5, 2024

Open-o3 Video: Grounded Video Reasoning with Explicit Spatio-Temporal Evidence

Most video reasoning models only generate textual reasoning traces without indicating when and where key evidence appears. Recent models such as OpenAI-o3 have sparked wide interest in evidence-centered reasoning for images, yet extending this ability to videos is more challenging, as it requires joint temporal tracking and spatial localization across dynamic scenes. We introduce Open-o3 Video, a non-agent framework that integrates explicit spatio-temporal evidence into video reasoning, and carefully collect training data and design training strategies to address the aforementioned challenges. The model highlights key timestamps, objects, and bounding boxes alongside its answers, allowing reasoning to be grounded in concrete visual observations. To enable this functionality, we first curate and build two high-quality datasets, STGR-CoT-30k for SFT and STGR-RL-36k for RL, with carefully constructed temporal and spatial annotations, since most existing datasets offer either temporal spans for videos or spatial boxes on images, lacking unified spatio-temporal supervision and reasoning traces. Then, we adopt a cold-start reinforcement learning strategy with multiple specially designed rewards that jointly encourage answer accuracy, temporal alignment, and spatial precision. On V-STAR benchmark, Open-o3 Video achieves state-of-the-art performance, raising mAM by 14.4% and mLGM by 24.2% on the Qwen2.5-VL baseline. Consistent improvements are also observed on a broad range of video understanding benchmarks, including VideoMME, WorldSense, VideoMMMU, and TVGBench. Beyond accuracy, the reasoning traces produced by Open-o3 Video also provide valuable signals for test-time scaling, enabling confidence-aware verification and improving answer reliability.

ByteDance ByteDance
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Oct 23 3