Existing acoustic indoor location sensing systems are limited by the need for extensive data collection and model retraining in unseen environments. This paper introduces ZA-SLAM, a novel zero-shot acoustic Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system that can be deployed in unseen environments without model retraining. Our core idea is to train an acoustic encoder that inherits the generalization capabilities of pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which show superiority in tasks like zero-shot visual SLAM. To achieve this goal, we perform Acoustic-Visual Feature Alignment to enable the acoustic encoder to generate features aligned with visual features from VLMs. To select high-quality images for effective alignment, we design a Semantic-Guided Image Selection that filters out low-quality collected images caused by factors like abrupt view changes, occlusions, and uninformative views. Furthermore, we address the challenge of false positive loop closures in structurally similar locations with the Learning-Based Trajectory Reachability Matching that validates loop closures leveraging IMU trajectory features. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate that our system achieves comparable SLAM performance to retraining-based acoustic SLAM, and much improved performance compared to existing zero-shot Wi-Fi and geomagnetic SLAM systems. Our system achieves a mean mapping error of 0.56 m and a localization error of 0.78 m across multiple unseen environments.

The sparsity of point clouds and inadequacy of semantic information pose challenges to current LiDAR-only 3D object detection methods. Recent methods alleviate these challenges by converting RGB images into virtual points via depth completion to be fused with LiDAR points. Although these methods have shown outstanding results, they often introduce significant computation overhead due to the high density of virtual points and noise due to inaccurate depth completion. Besides, they do not thoroughly leverage semantic information from images. In this work, we propose the virtual key instance enhanced network (ViKIENet), a highly efficient and effective multi-modal feature fusion framework that fuses the features of virtual key instances (VKIs) and LiDAR points through multiple stages. Our contributions include three main components: semantic key instance selection (SKIS), virtual-instance-focused fusion (VIFF), and virtual-instance-to-real attention (VIRA). We also propose the extended version ViKIENet-R with VIFF-R which includes rotationally equivariant features. Experiment results show that ViKIENet and ViKIENet-R achieve significant improvements in detection performance on the KITTI, JRDB, and nuScenes datasets compared to existing works. On the KITTI dataset, ViKIENet and ViKIENet-R operate at 22.7 and 15.0 FPS, respectively. As of CVPR submission (Nov. 15th, 2024), ViKIENet ranks first on the car detection and orientation estimation leaderboard, while ViKIENet-R ranks second (compared with officially published papers) on the 3D car detection leaderboard.