Recti-Q: Feature-Space Rectification for Out-of-Distribution-Robust Quantized Perception in Edge Robotics

Achieving Near-Zero-Overhead Multi-Model Hierarchical Classification in Real-Time Detection Pipelines

Edge-deployed vision systems in target recognition, surveillance, autonomous vehicles, and drone domains require hierarchical inference pipelines where a detection model identifies objects of interest and downstream classifiers provide fine-grained attribute analysis. Running all models on the GPU creates a serial bottleneck that limits real-time throughput as pipeline stages grow. Modern edge SoCs pair GPUs with dedicated neural accelerators (NPUs, DLAs) capable of concurrent execution, yet deploying custom models on these accelerators remains impractical due to strict operator constraints, quantization incompatibilities, and an undocumented end-to-end pipeline. We target NVIDIA Jetson DLA cores as the representative platform. We present a five-step methodology for zero GPU fallback DLA INT8 deployment of classification backbones, comprising architecture adaptation, manual dynamic range workaround to rescue TensorRT's implicit quantization (recovering 94.0% accuracy from implicit quantization's 75%) for rapid pipeline validation before explicit quantization, quantization-aware training, ONNX graph surgery for DLA compilation, and a concurrent GPU-detection/DLA-classification inference pipeline. We document nine engineering constraints with root-cause analysis and generalizable solutions. Validation on a dual-head person attribute classifier running on DLA alongside a GPU object detector on a Jetson Orin NX demonstrates near-zero pipeline overhead (12.5 vs. 13.3~FPS detector-only at 1080p), with dual-DLA scaling at no additional cost. The methodology is backbone-agnostic and generalizes to any detection-classification edge pipeline.

UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Elastic ViTs from Pretrained Models without Retraining

VQ-Transplant: Efficient VQ-Module Integration for Pre-trained Visual Tokenizers

Vector Quantization (VQ) underpins modern discrete visual tokenization. However, training quantization modules for state-of-the-art VQ-based models requires significant computational resources which, in practice, all but prevents the development of novel, cutting-edge VQ techniques under resource constraints. To address this limitation, we propose {\bf VQ-Transplant}, a simple framework that enables plug-and-play integration of new VQ modules into frozen, pre-trained tokenizers by replacing their native VQ modules. Crucially, the proposed transplantation process preserves all encoder-decoder parameters, obviating the need for costly end-to-end retraining when modifying the quantization method. To mitigate decoder-quantization mismatch, we introduce a lightweight decoder adaptation strategy (trained for only 5 epochs on ImageNet-1k) to align feature priors with the new quantization space. In our empirical evaluation, we find that VQ-Transplant allows obtaining near state-of-the-art reconstruction fidelity for industry-level models like VAR while reducing the training cost by 95\%. VQ-Transplant democratizes quantization research by enabling resource-efficient integration of novel VQ techniques while matching industry-level reconstruction performance.

Monocular distance estimation: from geometric foundations and deep learning innovations to industrial deployment challenges

Monocular distance estimation, a fundamental yet ill-posed problem in computer vision, has evolved from rigid geometric constraints to flexible deep learning paradigms. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of this transition, categorizing methodologies into traditional geometric-based, supervised, and self-supervised frameworks. We examine how traditional methods (e.g., size priors and ground-plane constraints) offer interpretability but struggle with environmental robustness. In the deep learning era, we detail the shift from CNN receptive field limitations to Transformer based global dependency modeling (e.g., DPT, MonoViT) and the mathematical progression from continuous regression to adaptive depth binning. A significant focus is placed on self-supervised mechanisms, specifically the "photometric consistency" assumption and landmark innovations like SfM-Learner’s joint optimization and Monodepth2’s auto masking strategy. Finally, we synthesize performance benchmarks on the KITTI and NYU Depth V2 datasets to highlight current bottlenecks—namely, scale ambiguity and domain shift. The review concludes that future industrial deployment on edge-computing platforms will rely on a synergy between lightweight network architectures and multi-sensor fusion.

DiD It in 87 Minutes: A Label-Free Softmax-to-Linear Adaptation of Vision Transformers for Object Detection

DiD is introduced, a label-free conversion method that exclusively trains the linear-attention backbone by aligning detector-facing interface tensors with those of a frozen Softmax teacher, and substantially outperforms established baselines and matches supervised, fully trained linear models.

P4Q: Learning to Prompt for Quantization in Low-Bit CLIP

Large-scale pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various visual and multimodal tasks. However, deploying these models on downstream application platforms remains challenging due to computational demands and domain gaps. Quantization offers a promising solution by significantly reducing these costs, making VLMs more feasible for deployment in such environments. There are two prevailing paradigms: Quantization-Aware Training (QAT), which preserves model performance but incurs substantial training costs; and Post-Training Quantization (PTQ), which offers greater efficiency but introduces multimodal gaps and leads to performance degradation on downstream tasks. To reduce computational costs and bridge domain gaps, we propose the “Prompt for Quantization” (P4Q) by integrating PTQ with Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques. P4Q compresses model parameters and activations via PTQ, introducing learnable prompts and low-bit adapters to enhance performance on downstream tasks. The learnable prompts embed downstream knowledge to mitigate domain gaps, while the low-bit adapters realign the distributions of image and text features, thereby mitigating multimodal gaps. We also introduce a distillation loss based on cosine similarity predictions to distill the quantized model using a full-precision teacher model. Extensive experiments on thirteen datasets demonstrate that P4Q significantly enhances the performance of low-bit CLIP while reducing deployment costs. For instance, an 8-bit P4Q compressed CLIP-ViT/B-32 achieves 66.94% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, surpassing the prompt fine-tuned full-precision counterpart by 2.24% while reducing model size by 4 \(\times\) . The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/HuixinSun/P4Q_official.