This paper presents a novel approach for hazard analysis in dashcam footage, addressing the detection of driver reactions to hazards, the identification of hazardous objects, and the generation of descriptive captions. We first introduce a method for detecting driver reactions through speed and sound anomaly detection, leveraging unsupervised learning techniques. For hazard detection, we employ a set of heuristic rules as weak classifiers, which are combined using an ensemble method. This ensemble approach is further refined with differential privacy to mitigate overconfidence, ensuring robustness despite the lack of labeled data. Lastly, we use state-of-the-art vision-language models for hazard captioning, generating descriptive labels for the detected hazards. Our method achieved the highest scores in the Challenge on Out-of-Label in Autonomous Driving, demonstrating its effectiveness across all three tasks. Source codes are publicly available at //github.com/ffyyytt/COOOL_2025.
In imitation learning for robotics, cotraining with demonstration data generated both in simulation and on real hardware has emerged as a powerful recipe to overcome the sim2real gap. This work seeks to elucidate basic principles of this sim-and-real cotraining to help inform simulation design, sim-and-real dataset creation, and policy training. Focusing narrowly on the canonical task of planar pushing from camera inputs enabled us to be thorough in our study. These experiments confirm that cotraining with simulated data \emph{can} dramatically improve performance in real, especially when real data is limited. Performance gains scale with simulated data, but eventually plateau; real-world data increases this performance ceiling. The results also suggest that reducing the domain gap in physics may be more important than visual fidelity for non-prehensile manipulation tasks. Perhaps surprisingly, having some visual domain gap actually helps the cotrained policy -- binary probes reveal that high-performing policies learn to distinguish simulated domains from real. We conclude by investigating this nuance and mechanisms that facilitate positive transfer between sim-and-real. In total, our experiments span over 40 real-world policies (evaluated on 800+ trials) and 200 simulated policies (evaluated on 40,000+ trials).
We introduce UniCon, a novel architecture designed to enhance control and efficiency in training adapters for large-scale diffusion models. Unlike existing methods that rely on bidirectional interaction between the diffusion model and control adapter, UniCon implements a unidirectional flow from the diffusion network to the adapter, allowing the adapter alone to generate the final output. UniCon reduces computational demands by eliminating the need for the diffusion model to compute and store gradients during adapter training. Our results indicate that UniCon reduces GPU memory usage by one-third and increases training speed by 2.3 times, while maintaining the same adapter parameter size. Additionally, without requiring extra computational resources, UniCon enables the training of adapters with double the parameter volume of existing ControlNets. In a series of image conditional generation tasks, UniCon has demonstrated precise responsiveness to control inputs and exceptional generation capabilities.
We present a general variational framework for the training of freeform nonlinearities in layered computational architectures subject to some slope constraints. The regularization that we add to the traditional training loss penalizes the second-order total variation of each trainable activation. The slope constraints allow us to impose properties such as 1-Lipschitz stability, firm non-expansiveness, and monotonicity/invertibility. These properties are crucial to ensure the proper functioning of certain classes of signal-processing algorithms (e.g., plug-and-play schemes, unrolled proximal gradient, invertible flows). We prove that the global optimum of the stated constrained-optimization problem is achieved with nonlinearities that are adaptive nonuniform linear splines. We then show how to solve the resulting function-optimization problem numerically by representing the nonlinearities in a suitable (nonuniform) B-spline basis. Finally, we illustrate the use of our framework with the data-driven design of (weakly) convex regularizers for the denoising of images and the resolution of inverse problems.
A hybrid physics-machine learning modeling framework is proposed for the surface vehicles' maneuvering motions to address the modeling capability and stability in the presence of environmental disturbances. From a deep learning perspective, the framework is based on a variant version of residual networks with additional feature extraction. Initially, an imperfect physical model is derived and identified to capture the fundamental hydrodynamic characteristics of marine vehicles. This model is then integrated with a feedforward network through a residual block. Additionally, feature extraction from trigonometric transformations is employed in the machine learning component to account for the periodic influence of currents and waves. The proposed method is evaluated using real navigational data from the 'JH7500' unmanned surface vehicle. The results demonstrate the robust generalizability and accurate long-term prediction capabilities of the nonlinear dynamic model in specific environmental conditions. This approach has the potential to be extended and applied to develop a comprehensive high-fidelity simulator.
This paper presents SANDMAN, an architecture for cyber deception that leverages Language Agents to emulate convincing human simulacra. Our 'Deceptive Agents' serve as advanced cyber decoys, designed for high-fidelity engagement with attackers by extending the observation period of attack behaviours. Through experimentation, measurement, and analysis, we demonstrate how a prompt schema based on the five-factor model of personality systematically induces distinct 'personalities' in Large Language Models. Our results highlight the feasibility of persona-driven Language Agents for generating diverse, realistic behaviours, ultimately improving cyber deception strategies.
We introduce AttentionSwarm, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate safe and efficient swarm control across three challenging environments: a landing environment with obstacles, a competitive drone game setting, and a dynamic drone racing scenario. Central to our approach is the Attention Model Based Control Barrier Function (CBF) framework, which integrates attention mechanisms with safety-critical control theory to enable real-time collision avoidance and trajectory optimization. This framework dynamically prioritizes critical obstacles and agents in the swarms vicinity using attention weights, while CBFs formally guarantee safety by enforcing collision-free constraints. The safe attention net algorithm was developed and evaluated using a swarm of Crazyflie 2.1 micro quadrotors, which were tested indoors with the Vicon motion capture system to ensure precise localization and control. Experimental results show that our system achieves landing accuracy of 3.02 cm with a mean time of 23 s and collision-free landings in a dynamic landing environment, 100% and collision-free navigation in a drone game environment, and 95% and collision-free navigation for a dynamic multiagent drone racing environment, underscoring its effectiveness and robustness in real-world scenarios. This work offers a promising foundation for applications in dynamic environments where safety and fastness are paramount.
This paper deals with the issue of conceptual models role in capturing semantics and aligning them to serve the remaining development phases of systems design. Specifically, the entity-relationship (ER) model is selected as an example of conceptual representation that serves this purpose in building relational database systems. It is claimed that ER diagrams provide a solid basis for subsequent technical implementation. The ER model appeal relies on its simplicity and its benefit in clarifying the requirements for databases. Nevertheless, some researchers have observed that this reduction of complexity is accompanied by oversimplification and overlooking dynamism. Accordingly, complaints have risen about the lack of direct compatibility between ER modeling and relational model. This paper is an attempt to explore what is beneath this static ER simplicity and its role as a base for subsequent technical implementation. In this undertaking, we use thinging machines (TMs), where modeling is constructed upon a single notion thimac (thing/machine). Thimac constituents are formed from the makeup of five actions, create, process, release, transfer, and receive that inject dynamism alongside with structure. The ER entities, attributes, and relationship are modeled as thimacs. Accordingly, in this paper, ER examples are remodeled in TM while identifying TM portions that correspond to ER components. The resulting TM model insets actions into entities, attributes and relationships. In this case, relationships are the products of creating linking thimacs plus the logic of constructing them. Based on such static/dynamic TM representation, the modeler can produce any level of simplification, including the original ER model. In conclusion, results indicated that the TM models facilitate multilevel simplicity and viable direct compatibility with the relational database model.
This thesis presents a novel framework for analysing the societal impacts of armed conflict by applying principles from engineering and material science. Building on the idea of a "social fabric", it recasts communities as plates with properties, such as resilience and vulnerability, analogous to material parameters like thickness or elasticity. Conflict events are treated as external forces that deform this fabric, revealing how repeated shocks and local weaknesses can compound over time. Using a custom Python-based Finite Element Analysis implementation, the thesis demonstrates how data on socioeconomic indicators (e.g., infrastructure, health, and demographics) and conflict incidents can be translated into a single computational model. Preliminary tests validate that results align with expected physical behaviours, and a proof-of-concept highlights how this approach can capture indirect or spillover effects and illuminate the areas most at risk of long-term harm. By bridging social science insights with computational modelling, this work offers an adaptable frame to inform both academic research and on-the-ground policy decisions for communities affected by violence.
We address the task of automatically scoring the competency of candidates based on textual features, from the automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcriptions in the asynchronous video job interview (AVI). The key challenge is how to construct the dependency relation between questions and answers, and conduct the semantic level interaction for each question-answer (QA) pair. However, most of the recent studies in AVI focus on how to represent questions and answers better, but ignore the dependency information and interaction between them, which is critical for QA evaluation. In this work, we propose a Hierarchical Reasoning Graph Neural Network (HRGNN) for the automatic assessment of question-answer pairs. Specifically, we construct a sentence-level relational graph neural network to capture the dependency information of sentences in or between the question and the answer. Based on these graphs, we employ a semantic-level reasoning graph attention network to model the interaction states of the current QA session. Finally, we propose a gated recurrent unit encoder to represent the temporal question-answer pairs for the final prediction. Empirical results conducted on CHNAT (a real-world dataset) validate that our proposed model significantly outperforms text-matching based benchmark models. Ablation studies and experimental results with 10 random seeds also show the effectiveness and stability of our models.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.