Junyu Gao

Reliable uncertainty estimation has become a crucial requirement for the industrial deployment of deep learning algorithms, particularly in high-risk applications such as autonomous driving and medical diagnosis. However, uncertainty estimation methods relying on deep ensembling or Bayesian neural networks typically entail significant computational overhead. To address this challenge, a novel paradigm called Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) has emerged, providing high-quality uncertainty estimation with minimal additional computation in a single forward pass. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the current research on EDL, designed to offer readers a broad introduction to the field without assuming prior knowledge. Specifically, we first delve into the theoretical foundation of EDL, the subjective logic theory, and discuss its distinctions from other uncertainty estimation frameworks. We further present existing theoretical advancements in EDL from four perspectives: reformulating the evidence collection process, improving uncertainty estimation via OOD samples, delving into various training strategies, and evidential regression networks. Thereafter, we elaborate on its extensive applications across various machine learning paradigms and downstream tasks. In the end, an outlook on future directions for better performances and broader adoption of EDL is provided, highlighting potential research avenues.

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) has garnered extensive attention in the field of embodied artificial intelligence. VLN involves time series information, where historical observations contain rich contextual knowledge and play a crucial role in navigation. However, current methods do not explicitly excavate the connection between rich contextual information in history and the current environment, and ignore adaptive learning of clues related to the current environment. Therefore, we explore a Prompt Learning-based strategy which adaptively mines information in history that is highly relevant to the current environment to enhance the agent’s perception of the current environment and propose a history-guided prompt generation (HGPG) framework. Specifically, HGPG includes two parts, one is an entropy-based history acquisition module that assesses the uncertainty of the action probability distribution from the preceding step to determine whether historical information should be used at the current time step. The other part is the prompt generation module that transforms historical context into prompt vectors by sampling from an end-to-end learned token library. These prompt tokens serve as discrete, knowledge-rich representations that encode semantic cues from historical observations in a compact form, making them easier for the decision network to understand and utilize. In addition, we share the token library across various navigation tasks, mining common features between different tasks to improve generalization to unknown environments. Extensive experimental results on four mainstream VLN benchmarks (R2R, REVERIE, SOON, R2R-CE) demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Code is available at https://github.com/Wzmshdong/HGPG.

Most cross-modal methods assume that training and testing data come from the same domain, which is often not the case in real-world scenarios due to cross-modal domain shifts and potential unknown concepts. Moreover, cross-modal shifts hinder the capture of unknown concepts, and the presence of unknown concepts can in turn exacerbate the cross-modal shifts. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a new paradigm called Active Cross-Modal Domain Adaptation (ACM-DA), wherein only cross-modal data from the source domain and uni-modal data from the target domain are utilized. To concurrently mitigate the adverse effects of both cross-modal domain shifts and unknown concepts, we propose a Curiosity-Driven Active Adaptation Network (CD-A2N), selectively annotating samples to maximize performance gain. First, we present Curiosity Arousal within Cross-modal Domain Adaptation (CA-CDA) to explore the complexity and novelty characteristics of target samples, while reducing cross-modal discrepancy and aligning source and target domains. Second, Curiosity-driven Active Learning (CAL) is devised to strategically select a subset of target samples for annotation, aiming to achieve more valuable data selection at a small labeling cost. Finally, we jointly train CA-CDA and CAL with the newly labeled target domain sub-dataset to alleviate the above issues. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CD-A2N provides an effective solution for achieving ACM-DA. Code will be available at https://github.com/Feliciaxyao/ACM-DA.

With only video-level event labels, this paper targets at the task of weakly-supervised audio-visual event perception (WS-AVEP), which aims to temporally localize and categorize events that belong to each modality. Despite the recent progress, most existing approaches either ignore the unsynchronized property of audio-visual tracks or discount the complementary modality for explicit enhancement. We argue that, a modality should provide ample presence evidence for an event, while the complementary modality offers absence evidence as a reference. However, to learn reliable evidence, we face challenging uncertainties caused by weak supervision and the complicated audio-visual data itself. To this end, we propose to collect Probabilistic Presence-Absence Evidence (PPAE) in a unified framework. Specifically, by leveraging uni-modal and cross-modal representations, a probabilistic presence-absence evidence collector (PAEC) is designed. To learn the evidence in a reliable range, we propose a joint-modal mutual learning (JML) process, which calibrates the evidence of diverse audible, visible, and audi-visible events adaptively and dynamically. Extensive experiments show that our method surpasses state-of-the-arts (e.g., absolute gains of $3.1\%$ and $4.2\%$ in terms of event-level audio and visual metrics on the LLP dataset).