Daily Papers

End-to-end human animation, such as audio-driven talking human generation, has undergone notable advancements in the recent few years. However, existing methods still struggle to scale up as large general video generation models, limiting their potential in real applications. In this paper, we propose OmniHuman, a Diffusion Transformer-based framework that scales up data by mixing motion-related conditions into the training phase. To this end, we introduce two training principles for these mixed conditions, along with the corresponding model architecture and inference strategy. These designs enable OmniHuman to fully leverage data-driven motion generation, ultimately achieving highly realistic human video generation. More importantly, OmniHuman supports various portrait contents (face close-up, portrait, half-body, full-body), supports both talking and singing, handles human-object interactions and challenging body poses, and accommodates different image styles. Compared to existing end-to-end audio-driven methods, OmniHuman not only produces more realistic videos, but also offers greater flexibility in inputs. It also supports multiple driving modalities (audio-driven, video-driven and combined driving signals). Video samples are provided on the ttfamily project page (https://omnihuman-lab.github.io)

Character Animation aims to generating character videos from still images through driving signals. Currently, diffusion models have become the mainstream in visual generation research, owing to their robust generative capabilities. However, challenges persist in the realm of image-to-video, especially in character animation, where temporally maintaining consistency with detailed information from character remains a formidable problem. In this paper, we leverage the power of diffusion models and propose a novel framework tailored for character animation. To preserve consistency of intricate appearance features from reference image, we design ReferenceNet to merge detail features via spatial attention. To ensure controllability and continuity, we introduce an efficient pose guider to direct character's movements and employ an effective temporal modeling approach to ensure smooth inter-frame transitions between video frames. By expanding the training data, our approach can animate arbitrary characters, yielding superior results in character animation compared to other image-to-video methods. Furthermore, we evaluate our method on benchmarks for fashion video and human dance synthesis, achieving state-of-the-art results.

We propose X-Portrait, an innovative conditional diffusion model tailored for generating expressive and temporally coherent portrait animation. Specifically, given a single portrait as appearance reference, we aim to animate it with motion derived from a driving video, capturing both highly dynamic and subtle facial expressions along with wide-range head movements. As its core, we leverage the generative prior of a pre-trained diffusion model as the rendering backbone, while achieve fine-grained head pose and expression control with novel controlling signals within the framework of ControlNet. In contrast to conventional coarse explicit controls such as facial landmarks, our motion control module is learned to interpret the dynamics directly from the original driving RGB inputs. The motion accuracy is further enhanced with a patch-based local control module that effectively enhance the motion attention to small-scale nuances like eyeball positions. Notably, to mitigate the identity leakage from the driving signals, we train our motion control modules with scaling-augmented cross-identity images, ensuring maximized disentanglement from the appearance reference modules. Experimental results demonstrate the universal effectiveness of X-Portrait across a diverse range of facial portraits and expressive driving sequences, and showcase its proficiency in generating captivating portrait animations with consistently maintained identity characteristics.

Diffusion-based human animation aims to animate a human character based on a source human image as well as driving signals such as a sequence of poses. Leveraging the generative capacity of diffusion model, existing approaches are able to generate high-fidelity poses, but struggle with significant viewpoint changes, especially in zoom-in/zoom-out scenarios where camera-character distance varies. This limits the applications such as cinematic shot type plan or camera control. We propose a pose-correlated reference selection diffusion network, supporting substantial viewpoint variations in human animation. Our key idea is to enable the network to utilize multiple reference images as input, since significant viewpoint changes often lead to missing appearance details on the human body. To eliminate the computational cost, we first introduce a novel pose correlation module to compute similarities between non-aligned target and source poses, and then propose an adaptive reference selection strategy, utilizing the attention map to identify key regions for animation generation. To train our model, we curated a large dataset from public TED talks featuring varied shots of the same character, helping the model learn synthesis for different perspectives. Our experimental results show that with the same number of reference images, our model performs favorably compared to the current SOTA methods under large viewpoint change. We further show that the adaptive reference selection is able to choose the most relevant reference regions to generate humans under free viewpoints.

Talking head synthesis is vital for virtual avatars and human-computer interaction. However, most existing methods are typically limited to accepting control from a single primary modality, restricting their practical utility. To this end, we introduce ACTalker, an end-to-end video diffusion framework that supports both multi-signals control and single-signal control for talking head video generation. For multiple control, we design a parallel mamba structure with multiple branches, each utilizing a separate driving signal to control specific facial regions. A gate mechanism is applied across all branches, providing flexible control over video generation. To ensure natural coordination of the controlled video both temporally and spatially, we employ the mamba structure, which enables driving signals to manipulate feature tokens across both dimensions in each branch. Additionally, we introduce a mask-drop strategy that allows each driving signal to independently control its corresponding facial region within the mamba structure, preventing control conflicts. Experimental results demonstrate that our method produces natural-looking facial videos driven by diverse signals and that the mamba layer seamlessly integrates multiple driving modalities without conflict.

Recent portrait animation methods have made significant strides in generating realistic lip synchronization. However, they often lack explicit control over head movements and facial expressions, and cannot produce videos from multiple viewpoints, resulting in less controllable and expressive animations. Moreover, text-guided portrait animation remains underexplored, despite its user-friendly nature. We present a novel two-stage text-guided framework, MVPortrait (Multi-view Vivid Portrait), to generate expressive multi-view portrait animations that faithfully capture the described motion and emotion. MVPortrait is the first to introduce FLAME as an intermediate representation, effectively embedding facial movements, expressions, and view transformations within its parameter space. In the first stage, we separately train the FLAME motion and emotion diffusion models based on text input. In the second stage, we train a multi-view video generation model conditioned on a reference portrait image and multi-view FLAME rendering sequences from the first stage. Experimental results exhibit that MVPortrait outperforms existing methods in terms of motion and emotion control, as well as view consistency. Furthermore, by leveraging FLAME as a bridge, MVPortrait becomes the first controllable portrait animation framework that is compatible with text, speech, and video as driving signals.

With the introduction of diffusion-based video generation techniques, audio-conditioned human video generation has recently achieved significant breakthroughs in both the naturalness of motion and the synthesis of portrait details. Due to the limited control of audio signals in driving human motion, existing methods often add auxiliary spatial signals to stabilize movements, which may compromise the naturalness and freedom of motion. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end audio-only conditioned video diffusion model named Loopy. Specifically, we designed an inter- and intra-clip temporal module and an audio-to-latents module, enabling the model to leverage long-term motion information from the data to learn natural motion patterns and improving audio-portrait movement correlation. This method removes the need for manually specified spatial motion templates used in existing methods to constrain motion during inference. Extensive experiments show that Loopy outperforms recent audio-driven portrait diffusion models, delivering more lifelike and high-quality results across various scenarios.

Due to the impressive capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), recent works have focused on employing MLLM-based agents for autonomous driving in large-scale and dynamic environments. However, prevalent approaches often directly translate high-level instructions into low-level vehicle control signals, which deviates from the inherent language generation paradigm of MLLMs and fails to fully harness their emergent powers. As a result, the generalizability of these methods is highly restricted by autonomous driving datasets used during fine-tuning. To tackle this challenge, we propose to connect high-level instructions and low-level control signals with mid-level language-driven commands, which are more fine-grained than high-level instructions but more universal and explainable than control signals, and thus can effectively bridge the gap in between. We implement this idea through a hierarchical multi-agent driving system named AD-H, including a MLLM planner for high-level reasoning and a lightweight controller for low-level execution. The hierarchical design liberates the MLLM from low-level control signal decoding and therefore fully releases their emergent capability in high-level perception, reasoning, and planning. We build a new dataset with action hierarchy annotations. Comprehensive closed-loop evaluations demonstrate several key advantages of our proposed AD-H system. First, AD-H can notably outperform state-of-the-art methods in achieving exceptional driving performance, even exhibiting self-correction capabilities during vehicle operation, a scenario not encountered in the training dataset. Second, AD-H demonstrates superior generalization under long-horizon instructions and novel environmental conditions, significantly surpassing current state-of-the-art methods. We will make our data and code publicly accessible at https://github.com/zhangzaibin/AD-H

In the past decade, autonomous driving has experienced rapid development in both academia and industry. However, its limited interpretability remains a significant unsolved problem, severely hindering autonomous vehicle commercialization and further development. Previous approaches utilizing small language models have failed to address this issue due to their lack of flexibility, generalization ability, and robustness. Recently, multimodal large language models (LLMs) have gained considerable attention from the research community for their capability to process and reason non-text data (e.g., images and videos) by text. In this paper, we present DriveGPT4, an interpretable end-to-end autonomous driving system utilizing LLMs. DriveGPT4 is capable of interpreting vehicle actions and providing corresponding reasoning, as well as answering diverse questions posed by human users for enhanced interaction. Additionally, DriveGPT4 predicts vehicle low-level control signals in an end-to-end fashion. These capabilities stem from a customized visual instruction tuning dataset specifically designed for autonomous driving. To the best of our knowledge, DriveGPT4 is the first work focusing on interpretable end-to-end autonomous driving. When evaluated on multiple tasks alongside conventional methods and video understanding LLMs, DriveGPT4 demonstrates superior qualitative and quantitative performance. Additionally, DriveGPT4 can be generalized in a zero-shot fashion to accommodate more unseen scenarios. The project page is available at https://tonyxuqaq.github.io/projects/DriveGPT4/ .

End-to-end autonomous driving demonstrates strong planning capabilities with large-scale data but still struggles in complex, rare scenarios due to limited commonsense. In contrast, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) excel in scene understanding and reasoning. The path forward lies in merging the strengths of both approaches. Previous methods using LVLMs to predict trajectories or control signals yield suboptimal results, as LVLMs are not well-suited for precise numerical predictions. This paper presents Senna, an autonomous driving system combining an LVLM (Senna-VLM) with an end-to-end model (Senna-E2E). Senna decouples high-level planning from low-level trajectory prediction. Senna-VLM generates planning decisions in natural language, while Senna-E2E predicts precise trajectories. Senna-VLM utilizes a multi-image encoding approach and multi-view prompts for efficient scene understanding. Besides, we introduce planning-oriented QAs alongside a three-stage training strategy, which enhances Senna-VLM's planning performance while preserving commonsense. Extensive experiments on two datasets show that Senna achieves state-of-the-art planning performance. Notably, with pre-training on a large-scale dataset DriveX and fine-tuning on nuScenes, Senna significantly reduces average planning error by 27.12% and collision rate by 33.33% over model without pre-training. We believe Senna's cross-scenario generalization and transferability are essential for achieving fully autonomous driving. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/hustvl/Senna.

The realization that complex systems such as ecological communities can collapse or shift regimes suddenly and without rapid external forcing poses a serious challenge to our understanding and management of the natural world. The potential to identify early warning signals that would allow researchers and managers to predict such events before they happen has therefore been an invaluable discovery that offers a way forward in spite of such seemingly unpredictable behavior. Research into early warning signals has demonstrated that it is possible to define and detect such early warning signals in advance of a transition in certain contexts. Here we describe the pattern emerging as research continues to explore just how far we can generalize these results. A core of examples emerges that shares three properties: the phenomenon of rapid regime shifts, a pattern of 'critical slowing down' that can be used to detect the approaching shift, and a mechanism of bifurcation driving the sudden change. As research has expanded beyond these core examples, it is becoming clear that not all systems that show regime shifts exhibit critical slowing down, or vice versa. Even when systems exhibit critical slowing down, statistical detection is a challenge. We review the literature that explores these edge cases and highlight the need for (a) new early warning behaviors that can be used in cases where rapid shifts do not exhibit critical slowing down, (b) the development of methods to identify which behavior might be an appropriate signal when encountering a novel system; bearing in mind that a positive indication for some systems is a negative indication in others, and (c) statistical methods that can distinguish between signatures of early warning behaviors and noise.

Tracking objects in three-dimensional space is critical for autonomous driving. To ensure safety while driving, the tracker must be able to reliably track objects across frames and accurately estimate their states such as velocity and acceleration in the present. Existing works frequently focus on the association task while either neglecting the model performance on state estimation or deploying complex heuristics to predict the states. In this paper, we propose STT, a Stateful Tracking model built with Transformers, that can consistently track objects in the scenes while also predicting their states accurately. STT consumes rich appearance, geometry, and motion signals through long term history of detections and is jointly optimized for both data association and state estimation tasks. Since the standard tracking metrics like MOTA and MOTP do not capture the combined performance of the two tasks in the wider spectrum of object states, we extend them with new metrics called S-MOTA and MOTPS that address this limitation. STT achieves competitive real-time performance on the Waymo Open Dataset.

End-to-end autonomous driving aims to build a fully differentiable system that takes raw sensor data as inputs and directly outputs the planned trajectory or control signals of the ego vehicle. State-of-the-art methods usually follow the `Teacher-Student' paradigm. The Teacher model uses privileged information (ground-truth states of surrounding agents and map elements) to learn the driving strategy. The student model only has access to raw sensor data and conducts behavior cloning on the data collected by the teacher model. By eliminating the noise of the perception part during planning learning, state-of-the-art works could achieve better performance with significantly less data compared to those coupled ones. However, under the current Teacher-Student paradigm, the student model still needs to learn a planning head from scratch, which could be challenging due to the redundant and noisy nature of raw sensor inputs and the casual confusion issue of behavior cloning. In this work, we aim to explore the possibility of directly adopting the strong teacher model to conduct planning while letting the student model focus more on the perception part. We find that even equipped with a SOTA perception model, directly letting the student model learn the required inputs of the teacher model leads to poor driving performance, which comes from the large distribution gap between predicted privileged inputs and the ground-truth. To this end, we propose DriveAdapter, which employs adapters with the feature alignment objective function between the student (perception) and teacher (planning) modules. Additionally, since the pure learning-based teacher model itself is imperfect and occasionally breaks safety rules, we propose a method of action-guided feature learning with a mask for those imperfect teacher features to further inject the priors of hand-crafted rules into the learning process.

The quest for fully autonomous vehicles (AVs) capable of navigating complex real-world scenarios with human-like understanding and responsiveness. In this paper, we introduce Dolphins, a novel vision-language model architected to imbibe human-like abilities as a conversational driving assistant. Dolphins is adept at processing multimodal inputs comprising video (or image) data, text instructions, and historical control signals to generate informed outputs corresponding to the provided instructions. Building upon the open-sourced pretrained Vision-Language Model, OpenFlamingo, we first enhance Dolphins's reasoning capabilities through an innovative Grounded Chain of Thought (GCoT) process. Then we tailored Dolphins to the driving domain by constructing driving-specific instruction data and conducting instruction tuning. Through the utilization of the BDD-X dataset, we designed and consolidated four distinct AV tasks into Dolphins to foster a holistic understanding of intricate driving scenarios. As a result, the distinctive features of Dolphins are characterized into two dimensions: (1) the ability to provide a comprehensive understanding of complex and long-tailed open-world driving scenarios and solve a spectrum of AV tasks, and (2) the emergence of human-like capabilities including gradient-free instant adaptation via in-context learning and error recovery via reflection.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated exceptional comprehension and interpretation capabilities in Autonomous Driving (AD) by incorporating large language models. Despite the advancements, current data-driven AD approaches tend to concentrate on a single dataset and specific tasks, neglecting their overall capabilities and ability to generalize. To bridge these gaps, we propose DriveMM, a general large multimodal model designed to process diverse data inputs, such as images and multi-view videos, while performing a broad spectrum of AD tasks, including perception, prediction, and planning. Initially, the model undergoes curriculum pre-training to process varied visual signals and perform basic visual comprehension and perception tasks. Subsequently, we augment and standardize various AD-related datasets to fine-tune the model, resulting in an all-in-one LMM for autonomous driving. To assess the general capabilities and generalization ability, we conduct evaluations on six public benchmarks and undertake zero-shot transfer on an unseen dataset, where DriveMM achieves state-of-the-art performance across all tasks. We hope DriveMM as a promising solution for future end-toend autonomous driving applications in the real world.

For autonomous vehicles to safely share the road with human drivers, autonomous vehicles must abide by specific "road rules" that human drivers have agreed to follow. "Road rules" include rules that drivers are required to follow by law -- such as the requirement that vehicles stop at red lights -- as well as more subtle social rules -- such as the implicit designation of fast lanes on the highway. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence that suggests that -- instead of hard-coding road rules into self-driving algorithms -- a scalable alternative may be to design multi-agent environments in which road rules emerge as optimal solutions to the problem of maximizing traffic flow. We analyze what ingredients in driving environments cause the emergence of these road rules and find that two crucial factors are noisy perception and agents' spatial density. We provide qualitative and quantitative evidence of the emergence of seven social driving behaviors, ranging from obeying traffic signals to following lanes, all of which emerge from training agents to drive quickly to destinations without colliding. Our results add empirical support for the social road rules that countries worldwide have agreed on for safe, efficient driving.

Recent research about Large Language Model based autonomous driving solutions shows a promising picture in planning and control fields. However, heavy computational resources and hallucinations of Large Language Models continue to hinder the tasks of predicting precise trajectories and instructing control signals. To address this problem, we propose Co-driver, a novel autonomous driving assistant system to empower autonomous vehicles with adjustable driving behaviors based on the understanding of road scenes. A pipeline involving the CARLA simulator and Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2) verifying the effectiveness of our system is presented, utilizing a single Nvidia 4090 24G GPU while exploiting the capacity of textual output of the Visual Language Model. Besides, we also contribute a dataset containing an image set and a corresponding prompt set for fine-tuning the Visual Language Model module of our system. In the real-world driving dataset, our system achieved 96.16% success rate in night scenes and 89.7% in gloomy scenes regarding reasonable predictions. Our Co-driver dataset will be released at https://github.com/ZionGo6/Co-driver.

Evaluating the performance of perception modules in autonomous driving is one of the most critical tasks in developing the complex intelligent system. While module-level unit test metrics adopted from traditional computer vision tasks are feasible to some extent, it remains far less explored to measure the impact of perceptual noise on the driving quality of autonomous vehicles in a consistent and holistic manner. In this work, we propose a principled framework that provides a coherent and systematic understanding of the impact an error in the perception module imposes on an autonomous agent's planning that actually controls the vehicle. Specifically, the planning process is formulated as expected utility maximisation, where all input signals from upstream modules jointly provide a world state description, and the planner strives for the optimal action by maximising the expected utility determined by both world states and actions. We show that, under practical conditions, the objective function can be represented as an inner product between the world state description and the utility function in a Hilbert space. This geometric interpretation enables a novel way to analyse the impact of noise in world state estimation on planning and leads to a universal metric for evaluating perception. The whole framework resembles the idea of transcendental idealism in the classical philosophical literature, which gives the name to our approach.

All vehicles must follow the rules that govern traffic behavior, regardless of whether the vehicles are human-driven or Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs). Road signs indicate locally active rules, such as speed limits and requirements to yield or stop. Recent research has demonstrated attacks, such as adding stickers or projected colored patches to signs, that cause CAV misinterpretation, resulting in potential safety issues. Humans can see and potentially defend against these attacks. But humans can not detect what they can not observe. We have developed an effective physical-world attack that leverages the sensitivity of filterless image sensors and the properties of Infrared Laser Reflections (ILRs), which are invisible to humans. The attack is designed to affect CAV cameras and perception, undermining traffic sign recognition by inducing misclassification. In this work, we formulate the threat model and requirements for an ILR-based traffic sign perception attack to succeed. We evaluate the effectiveness of the ILR attack with real-world experiments against two major traffic sign recognition architectures on four IR-sensitive cameras. Our black-box optimization methodology allows the attack to achieve up to a 100% attack success rate in indoor, static scenarios and a >80.5% attack success rate in our outdoor, moving vehicle scenarios. We find the latest state-of-the-art certifiable defense is ineffective against ILR attacks as it mis-certifies >33.5% of cases. To address this, we propose a detection strategy based on the physical properties of IR laser reflections which can detect 96% of ILR attacks.

Head avatars animated by visual signals have gained popularity, particularly in cross-driving synthesis where the driver differs from the animated character, a challenging but highly practical approach. The recently presented MegaPortraits model has demonstrated state-of-the-art results in this domain. We conduct a deep examination and evaluation of this model, with a particular focus on its latent space for facial expression descriptors, and uncover several limitations with its ability to express intense face motions. To address these limitations, we propose substantial changes in both training pipeline and model architecture, to introduce our EMOPortraits model, where we: Enhance the model's capability to faithfully support intense, asymmetric face expressions, setting a new state-of-the-art result in the emotion transfer task, surpassing previous methods in both metrics and quality. Incorporate speech-driven mode to our model, achieving top-tier performance in audio-driven facial animation, making it possible to drive source identity through diverse modalities, including visual signal, audio, or a blend of both. We propose a novel multi-view video dataset featuring a wide range of intense and asymmetric facial expressions, filling the gap with absence of such data in existing datasets.

The pursuit of autonomous driving technology hinges on the sophisticated integration of perception, decision-making, and control systems. Traditional approaches, both data-driven and rule-based, have been hindered by their inability to grasp the nuance of complex driving environments and the intentions of other road users. This has been a significant bottleneck, particularly in the development of common sense reasoning and nuanced scene understanding necessary for safe and reliable autonomous driving. The advent of Visual Language Models (VLM) represents a novel frontier in realizing fully autonomous vehicle driving. This report provides an exhaustive evaluation of the latest state-of-the-art VLM, \modelnamefull, and its application in autonomous driving scenarios. We explore the model's abilities to understand and reason about driving scenes, make decisions, and ultimately act in the capacity of a driver. Our comprehensive tests span from basic scene recognition to complex causal reasoning and real-time decision-making under varying conditions. Our findings reveal that \modelname demonstrates superior performance in scene understanding and causal reasoning compared to existing autonomous systems. It showcases the potential to handle out-of-distribution scenarios, recognize intentions, and make informed decisions in real driving contexts. However, challenges remain, particularly in direction discernment, traffic light recognition, vision grounding, and spatial reasoning tasks. These limitations underscore the need for further research and development. Project is now available on GitHub for interested parties to access and utilize: https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/GPT4V-AD-Exploration

Despite advancements in Large Language Model (LLM) alignment, understanding the reasons behind LLM preferences remains crucial for bridging the gap between desired and actual behavior. LLMs often exhibit biases or tendencies that diverge from human preferences, such as favoring certain writing styles or producing overly verbose outputs. However, current methods for evaluating preference alignment often lack explainability, relying on coarse-grained comparisons. To address this, we introduce PROFILE (PRObing Factors of InfLuence for Explainability), a novel framework that uncovers and quantifies the influence of specific factors driving preferences. PROFILE's factor level analysis explains the 'why' behind human-model alignment and misalignment, offering insights into the direction of model improvement. We apply PROFILE to analyze human and LLM preferences across three tasks: summarization, helpful response generation, and document-based question-answering. Our factor level analysis reveals a substantial discrepancy between human and LLM preferences in generation tasks, whereas LLMs show strong alignment with human preferences in evaluation tasks. We demonstrate how leveraging factor level insights, including addressing misaligned factors or exploiting the generation-evaluation gap, can improve alignment with human preferences. This work underscores the importance of explainable preference analysis and highlights PROFILE's potential to provide valuable training signals, driving further improvements in human-model alignment.

Understanding other drivers' intentions is crucial for safe driving. The role of taillights in conveying these intentions is underemphasized in current autonomous driving systems. Accurately identifying taillight signals is essential for predicting vehicle behavior and preventing collisions. Open-source taillight datasets are scarce, often small and inconsistently annotated. To address this gap, we introduce a new large-scale taillight dataset called TLD. Sourced globally, our dataset covers diverse traffic scenarios. To our knowledge, TLD is the first dataset to separately annotate brake lights and turn signals in real driving scenarios. We collected 17.78 hours of driving videos from the internet. This dataset consists of 152k labeled image frames sampled at a rate of 2 Hz, along with 1.5 million unlabeled frames interspersed throughout. Additionally, we have developed a two-stage vehicle light detection model consisting of two primary modules: a vehicle detector and a taillight classifier. Initially, YOLOv10 and DeepSORT captured consecutive vehicle images over time. Subsequently, the two classifiers work simultaneously to determine the states of the brake lights and turn signals. A post-processing procedure is then used to eliminate noise caused by misidentifications and provide the taillight states of the vehicle within a given time frame. Our method shows exceptional performance on our dataset, establishing a benchmark for vehicle taillight detection. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ChaiJohn/TLD/tree/main

Traffic congestion in dense urban centers presents an economical and environmental burden. In recent years, the availability of vehicle-to-anything communication allows for the transmission of detailed vehicle states to the infrastructure that can be used for intelligent traffic light control. The other way around, the infrastructure can provide vehicles with advice on driving behavior, such as appropriate velocities, which can improve the efficacy of the traffic system. Several research works applied deep reinforcement learning to either traffic light control or vehicle speed advice. In this work, we propose a first attempt to jointly learn the control of both. We show this to improve the efficacy of traffic systems. In our experiments, the joint control approach reduces average vehicle trip delays, w.r.t. controlling only traffic lights, in eight out of eleven benchmark scenarios. Analyzing the qualitative behavior of the vehicle speed advice policy, we observe that this is achieved by smoothing out the velocity profile of vehicles nearby a traffic light. Learning joint control of traffic signaling and speed advice in the real world could help to reduce congestion and mitigate the economical and environmental repercussions of today's traffic systems.

This paper presents the development of a comprehensive dataset capturing interactions between Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and traffic control devices, specifically traffic lights and stop signs. Derived from the Waymo Motion dataset, our work addresses a critical gap in the existing literature by providing real-world trajectory data on how AVs navigate these traffic control devices. We propose a methodology for identifying and extracting relevant interaction trajectory data from the Waymo Motion dataset, incorporating over 37,000 instances with traffic lights and 44,000 with stop signs. Our methodology includes defining rules to identify various interaction types, extracting trajectory data, and applying a wavelet-based denoising method to smooth the acceleration and speed profiles and eliminate anomalous values, thereby enhancing the trajectory quality. Quality assessment metrics indicate that trajectories obtained in this study have anomaly proportions in acceleration and jerk profiles reduced to near-zero levels across all interaction categories. By making this dataset publicly available, we aim to address the current gap in datasets containing AV interaction behaviors with traffic lights and signs. Based on the organized and published dataset, we can gain a more in-depth understanding of AVs' behavior when interacting with traffic lights and signs. This will facilitate research on AV integration into existing transportation infrastructures and networks, supporting the development of more accurate behavioral models and simulation tools.

We describe an iterative active-learning algorithm to recognise rare traffic signs. A standard ResNet is trained on a training set containing only a single sample of the rare class. We demonstrate that by sorting the samples of a large, unlabeled set by the estimated probability of belonging to the rare class, we can efficiently identify samples from the rare class. This works despite the fact that this estimated probability is usually quite low. A reliable active-learning loop is obtained by labeling these candidate samples, including them in the training set, and iterating the procedure. Further, we show that we get similar results starting from a single synthetic sample. Our results are important as they indicate a straightforward way of improving traffic-sign recognition for automated driving systems. In addition, they show that we can make use of the information hidden in low confidence outputs, which is usually ignored.

In autonomous driving tasks, trajectory prediction in complex traffic environments requires adherence to real-world context conditions and behavior multimodalities. Existing methods predominantly rely on prior assumptions or generative models trained on curated data to learn road agents' stochastic behavior bounded by scene constraints. However, they often face mode averaging issues due to data imbalance and simplistic priors, and could even suffer from mode collapse due to unstable training and single ground truth supervision. These issues lead the existing methods to a loss of predictive diversity and adherence to the scene constraints. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel trajectory generator named Controllable Diffusion Trajectory (CDT), which integrates map information and social interactions into a Transformer-based conditional denoising diffusion model to guide the prediction of future trajectories. To ensure multimodality, we incorporate behavioral tokens to direct the trajectory's modes, such as going straight, turning right or left. Moreover, we incorporate the predicted endpoints as an alternative behavioral token into the CDT model to facilitate the prediction of accurate trajectories. Extensive experiments on the Argoverse 2 benchmark demonstrate that CDT excels in generating diverse and scene-compliant trajectories in complex urban settings.

Traffic Signal Control (TSC) is a crucial component in urban traffic management, aiming to optimize road network efficiency and reduce congestion. Traditional methods in TSC, primarily based on transportation engineering and reinforcement learning (RL), often exhibit limitations in generalization across varied traffic scenarios and lack interpretability. This paper presents LLMLight, a novel framework employing Large Language Models (LLMs) as decision-making agents for TSC. Specifically, the framework begins by instructing the LLM with a knowledgeable prompt detailing real-time traffic conditions. Leveraging the advanced generalization capabilities of LLMs, LLMLight engages a reasoning and decision-making process akin to human intuition for effective traffic control. Moreover, we build LightGPT, a specialized backbone LLM tailored for TSC tasks. By learning nuanced traffic patterns and control strategies, LightGPT enhances the LLMLight framework cost-effectively. Extensive experiments on nine real-world and synthetic datasets showcase the remarkable effectiveness, generalization ability, and interpretability of LLMLight against nine transportation-based and RL-based baselines.

Congestion in traffic is an unavoidable circumstance in many cities in India and other countries. It is an issue of major concern. The steep rise in the number of automobiles on the roads followed by old infrastructure, accidents, pedestrian traffic, and traffic rule violations all add to challenging traffic conditions. Given these poor conditions of traffic, there is a critical need for automatically detecting and signaling systems. There are already various technologies that are used for traffic management and signaling systems like video analysis, infrared sensors, and wireless sensors. The main issue with these methods is they are very costly and high maintenance is required. In this paper, we have proposed a three-phase system that can guide emergency vehicles and manage traffic based on the degree of congestion. In the first phase, the system processes the captured images and calculates the Index value which is used to discover the degree of congestion. The Index value of a particular road depends on its width and the length up to which the camera captures images of that road. We have to take input for the parameters (length and width) while setting up the system. In the second phase, the system checks whether there are any emergency vehicles present or not in any lane. In the third phase, the whole processing and decision-making part is performed at the edge server. The proposed model is robust and it takes into consideration adverse weather conditions such as hazy, foggy, and windy. It works very efficiently in low light conditions also. The edge server is a strategically placed server that provides us with low latency and better connectivity. Using Edge technology in this traffic management system reduces the strain on cloud servers and the system becomes more reliable in real-time because the latency and bandwidth get reduced due to processing at the intermediate edge server.

Early warning signals have been proposed to forecast the possibility of a critical transition, such as the eutrophication of a lake, the collapse of a coral reef, or the end of a glacial period. Because such transitions often unfold on temporal and spatial scales that can be difficult to approach by experimental manipulation, research has often relied on historical observations as a source of natural experiments. Here we examine a critical difference between selecting systems for study based on the fact that we have observed a critical transition and those systems for which we wish to forecast the approach of a transition. This difference arises by conditionally selecting systems known to experience a transition of some sort and failing to account for the bias this introduces -- a statistical error often known as the Prosecutor's Fallacy. By analysing simulated systems that have experienced transitions purely by chance, we reveal an elevated rate of false positives in common warning signal statistics. We further demonstrate a model-based approach that is less subject to this bias than these more commonly used summary statistics. We note that experimental studies with replicates avoid this pitfall entirely.

End-to-end autonomous driving, where the entire driving pipeline is replaced with a single neural network, has recently gained research attention because of its simpler structure and faster inference time. Despite this appealing approach largely reducing the complexity in the driving pipeline, it also leads to safety issues because the trained policy is not always compliant with the traffic rules. In this paper, we proposed P-CSG, a penalty-based imitation learning approach with contrastive-based cross semantics generation sensor fusion technologies to increase the overall performance of end-to-end autonomous driving. In this method, we introduce three penalties - red light, stop sign, and curvature speed penalty to make the agent more sensitive to traffic rules. The proposed cross semantics generation helps to align the shared information of different input modalities. We assessed our model's performance using the CARLA Leaderboard - Town 05 Long Benchmark and Longest6 Benchmark, achieving 8.5% and 2.0% driving score improvement compared to the baselines. Furthermore, we conducted robustness evaluations against adversarial attacks like FGSM and Dot attacks, revealing a substantial increase in robustness compared to other baseline models. More detailed information can be found at https://hk-zh.github.io/p-csg-plus.

Closed-loop simulation is essential for advancing end-to-end autonomous driving systems. Contemporary sensor simulation methods, such as NeRF and 3DGS, rely predominantly on conditions closely aligned with training data distributions, which are largely confined to forward-driving scenarios. Consequently, these methods face limitations when rendering complex maneuvers (e.g., lane change, acceleration, deceleration). Recent advancements in autonomous-driving world models have demonstrated the potential to generate diverse driving videos. However, these approaches remain constrained to 2D video generation, inherently lacking the spatiotemporal coherence required to capture intricacies of dynamic driving environments. In this paper, we introduce DriveDreamer4D, which enhances 4D driving scene representation leveraging world model priors. Specifically, we utilize the world model as a data machine to synthesize novel trajectory videos based on real-world driving data. Notably, we explicitly leverage structured conditions to control the spatial-temporal consistency of foreground and background elements, thus the generated data adheres closely to traffic constraints. To our knowledge, DriveDreamer4D is the first to utilize video generation models for improving 4D reconstruction in driving scenarios. Experimental results reveal that DriveDreamer4D significantly enhances generation quality under novel trajectory views, achieving a relative improvement in FID by 24.5%, 39.0%, and 10.5% compared to PVG, S3Gaussian, and Deformable-GS. Moreover, DriveDreamer4D markedly enhances the spatiotemporal coherence of driving agents, which is verified by a comprehensive user study and the relative increases of 20.3%, 42.0%, and 13.7% in the NTA-IoU metric.

Prior work in 3D object detection evaluates models using offline metrics like average precision since closed-loop online evaluation on the downstream driving task is costly. However, it is unclear how indicative offline results are of driving performance. In this work, we perform the first empirical evaluation measuring how predictive different detection metrics are of driving performance when detectors are integrated into a full self-driving stack. We conduct extensive experiments on urban driving in the CARLA simulator using 16 object detection models. We find that the nuScenes Detection Score has a higher correlation to driving performance than the widely used average precision metric. In addition, our results call for caution on the exclusive reliance on the emerging class of `planner-centric' metrics.

Focusing on the task of point-to-point navigation for an autonomous driving vehicle, we propose a novel deep learning model trained with end-to-end and multi-task learning manners to perform both perception and control tasks simultaneously. The model is used to drive the ego vehicle safely by following a sequence of routes defined by the global planner. The perception part of the model is used to encode high-dimensional observation data provided by an RGBD camera while performing semantic segmentation, semantic depth cloud (SDC) mapping, and traffic light state and stop sign prediction. Then, the control part decodes the encoded features along with additional information provided by GPS and speedometer to predict waypoints that come with a latent feature space. Furthermore, two agents are employed to process these outputs and make a control policy that determines the level of steering, throttle, and brake as the final action. The model is evaluated on CARLA simulator with various scenarios made of normal-adversarial situations and different weathers to mimic real-world conditions. In addition, we do a comparative study with some recent models to justify the performance in multiple aspects of driving. Moreover, we also conduct an ablation study on SDC mapping and multi-agent to understand their roles and behavior. As a result, our model achieves the highest driving score even with fewer parameters and computation load. To support future studies, we share our codes at https://github.com/oskarnatan/end-to-end-driving.

End-to-end driving systems have recently made rapid progress, in particular on CARLA. Independent of their major contribution, they introduce changes to minor system components. Consequently, the source of improvements is unclear. We identify two biases that recur in nearly all state-of-the-art methods and are critical for the observed progress on CARLA: (1) lateral recovery via a strong inductive bias towards target point following, and (2) longitudinal averaging of multimodal waypoint predictions for slowing down. We investigate the drawbacks of these biases and identify principled alternatives. By incorporating our insights, we develop TF++, a simple end-to-end method that ranks first on the Longest6 and LAV benchmarks, gaining 14 driving score over the best prior work on Longest6.

Driver distraction has become a significant cause of severe traffic accidents over the past decade. Despite the growing development of vision-driven driver monitoring systems, the lack of comprehensive perception datasets restricts road safety and traffic security. In this paper, we present an AssIstive Driving pErception dataset (AIDE) that considers context information both inside and outside the vehicle in naturalistic scenarios. AIDE facilitates holistic driver monitoring through three distinctive characteristics, including multi-view settings of driver and scene, multi-modal annotations of face, body, posture, and gesture, and four pragmatic task designs for driving understanding. To thoroughly explore AIDE, we provide experimental benchmarks on three kinds of baseline frameworks via extensive methods. Moreover, two fusion strategies are introduced to give new insights into learning effective multi-stream/modal representations. We also systematically investigate the importance and rationality of the key components in AIDE and benchmarks. The project link is https://github.com/ydk122024/AIDE.

A reply to Drake (2013) "Early warning signals of stochastic switching" http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.0686

Vehicle-to-Everything communications-assisted Autonomous Driving (V2X-AD) has witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, with pragmatic communications (PragComm) emerging as a promising paradigm for real-time collaboration among vehicles and other agents.Simultaneously, extensive research has explored the interplay between collaborative perception and decision-making in end-to-end driving frameworks.In this work, we revisit the collaborative driving problem and propose the Select2Drive framework to optimize the utilization of limited computational and communication resources.Particularly, to mitigate cumulative latency in perception and decision-making, Select2Drive introduces Distributed Predictive Perception (DPP) by formulating an active prediction paradigm and simplifies high-dimensional semantic feature prediction into computation cost-efficient, motion-aware reconstruction. Given the "less is more" principle that a broadened perceptual horizon possibly confuses the decision module rather than contributing to it, Select2Drive utilizes Area-of-Importance-based PragComm (APC) to prioritize the communications of critical regions, thus boosting both communication efficiency and decision-making efficacy. Empirical evaluations on the V2Xverse dataset and CARLA driving simulator demonstrate that Select2Drive achieves a 11.31% (resp. 7.69%) improvement in offline perception tasks under limited bandwidth (resp. pose error conditions). Moreover, it delivers at most 14.68% and 31.76% enhancement in closed-loop driving scores and route completion rates, particularly in scenarios characterized by dense traffic and high-speed dynamics.

Traffic signal control is an emerging application scenario for reinforcement learning. Besides being as an important problem that affects people's daily life in commuting, traffic signal control poses its unique challenges for reinforcement learning in terms of adapting to dynamic traffic environment and coordinating thousands of agents including vehicles and pedestrians. A key factor in the success of modern reinforcement learning relies on a good simulator to generate a large number of data samples for learning. The most commonly used open-source traffic simulator SUMO is, however, not scalable to large road network and large traffic flow, which hinders the study of reinforcement learning on traffic scenarios. This motivates us to create a new traffic simulator CityFlow with fundamentally optimized data structures and efficient algorithms. CityFlow can support flexible definitions for road network and traffic flow based on synthetic and real-world data. It also provides user-friendly interface for reinforcement learning. Most importantly, CityFlow is more than twenty times faster than SUMO and is capable of supporting city-wide traffic simulation with an interactive render for monitoring. Besides traffic signal control, CityFlow could serve as the base for other transportation studies and can create new possibilities to test machine learning methods in the intelligent transportation domain.

Simulators offer the possibility of safe, low-cost development of self-driving systems. However, current driving simulators exhibit na\"ive behavior models for background traffic. Hand-tuned scenarios are typically added during simulation to induce safety-critical situations. An alternative approach is to adversarially perturb the background traffic trajectories. In this paper, we study this approach to safety-critical driving scenario generation using the CARLA simulator. We use a kinematic bicycle model as a proxy to the simulator's true dynamics and observe that gradients through this proxy model are sufficient for optimizing the background traffic trajectories. Based on this finding, we propose KING, which generates safety-critical driving scenarios with a 20% higher success rate than black-box optimization. By solving the scenarios generated by KING using a privileged rule-based expert algorithm, we obtain training data for an imitation learning policy. After fine-tuning on this new data, we show that the policy becomes better at avoiding collisions. Importantly, our generated data leads to reduced collisions on both held-out scenarios generated via KING as well as traditional hand-crafted scenarios, demonstrating improved robustness.

Several popular computer vision (CV) datasets, specifically employed for Object Detection (OD) in autonomous driving tasks exhibit biases due to a range of factors including weather and lighting conditions. These biases may impair a model's generalizability, rendering it ineffective for OD in novel and unseen datasets. Especially, in autonomous driving, it may prove extremely high risk and unsafe for the vehicle and its surroundings. This work focuses on understanding these datasets better by identifying such "good-weather" bias. Methods to mitigate such bias which allows the OD models to perform better and improve the robustness are also demonstrated. A simple yet effective OD framework for studying bias mitigation is proposed. Using this framework, the performance on popular datasets is analyzed and a significant difference in model performance is observed. Additionally, a knowledge transfer technique and a synthetic image corruption technique are proposed to mitigate the identified bias. Finally, using the DAWN dataset, the findings are validated on the OD task, demonstrating the effectiveness of our techniques in mitigating real-world "good-weather" bias. The experiments show that the proposed techniques outperform baseline methods by averaged fourfold improvement.

Accurate Vehicle Trajectory Prediction is critical for automated vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems. Vehicle trajectory prediction consists of two essential tasks, i.e., longitudinal position prediction and lateral position prediction. There is a significant correlation between driving intentions and vehicle motion. In existing work, the three tasks are often conducted separately without considering the relationships between the longitudinal position, lateral position, and driving intention. In this paper, we propose a novel Temporal Multi-Gate Mixture-of-Experts (TMMOE) model for simultaneously predicting the vehicle trajectory and driving intention. The proposed model consists of three layers: a shared layer, an expert layer, and a fully connected layer. In the model, the shared layer utilizes Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN) to extract temporal features. Then the expert layer is built to identify different information according to the three tasks. Moreover, the fully connected layer is used to integrate and export prediction results. To achieve better performance, uncertainty algorithm is used to construct the multi-task loss function. Finally, the publicly available CitySim dataset validates the TMMOE model, demonstrating superior performance compared to the LSTM model, achieving the highest classification and regression results. Keywords: Vehicle trajectory prediction, driving intentions Classification, Multi-task

In this paper, we explore the potential of using a large language model (LLM) to understand the driving environment in a human-like manner and analyze its ability to reason, interpret, and memorize when facing complex scenarios. We argue that traditional optimization-based and modular autonomous driving (AD) systems face inherent performance limitations when dealing with long-tail corner cases. To address this problem, we propose that an ideal AD system should drive like a human, accumulating experience through continuous driving and using common sense to solve problems. To achieve this goal, we identify three key abilities necessary for an AD system: reasoning, interpretation, and memorization. We demonstrate the feasibility of employing an LLM in driving scenarios by building a closed-loop system to showcase its comprehension and environment-interaction abilities. Our extensive experiments show that the LLM exhibits the impressive ability to reason and solve long-tailed cases, providing valuable insights for the development of human-like autonomous driving. The related code are available at https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/DriveLikeAHuman .

Traffic Salient Object Detection (TSOD) aims to segment the objects critical to driving safety by combining semantic (e.g., collision risks) and visual saliency. Unlike SOD in natural scene images (NSI-SOD), which prioritizes visually distinctive regions, TSOD emphasizes the objects that demand immediate driver attention due to their semantic impact, even with low visual contrast. This dual criterion, i.e., bridging perception and contextual risk, re-defines saliency for autonomous and assisted driving systems. To address the lack of task-specific benchmarks, we collect the first large-scale TSOD dataset with pixel-wise saliency annotations, named TSOD10K. TSOD10K covers the diverse object categories in various real-world traffic scenes under various challenging weather/illumination variations (e.g., fog, snowstorms, low-contrast, and low-light). Methodologically, we propose a Mamba-based TSOD model, termed Tramba. Considering the challenge of distinguishing inconspicuous visual information from complex traffic backgrounds, Tramba introduces a novel Dual-Frequency Visual State Space module equipped with shifted window partitioning and dilated scanning to enhance the perception of fine details and global structure by hierarchically decomposing high/low-frequency components. To emphasize critical regions in traffic scenes, we propose a traffic-oriented Helix 2D-Selective-Scan (Helix-SS2D) mechanism that injects driving attention priors while effectively capturing global multi-direction spatial dependencies. We establish a comprehensive benchmark by evaluating Tramba and 22 existing NSI-SOD models on TSOD10K, demonstrating Tramba's superiority. Our research establishes the first foundation for safety-aware saliency analysis in intelligent transportation systems.

In autonomous driving (AD), accurate perception is indispensable to achieving safe and secure driving. Due to its safety-criticality, the security of AD perception has been widely studied. Among different attacks on AD perception, the physical adversarial object evasion attacks are especially severe. However, we find that all existing literature only evaluates their attack effect at the targeted AI component level but not at the system level, i.e., with the entire system semantics and context such as the full AD pipeline. Thereby, this raises a critical research question: can these existing researches effectively achieve system-level attack effects (e.g., traffic rule violations) in the real-world AD context? In this work, we conduct the first measurement study on whether and how effectively the existing designs can lead to system-level effects, especially for the STOP sign-evasion attacks due to their popularity and severity. Our evaluation results show that all the representative prior works cannot achieve any system-level effects. We observe two design limitations in the prior works: 1) physical model-inconsistent object size distribution in pixel sampling and 2) lack of vehicle plant model and AD system model consideration. Then, we propose SysAdv, a novel system-driven attack design in the AD context and our evaluation results show that the system-level effects can be significantly improved, i.e., the violation rate increases by around 70%.

A longstanding challenge for self-driving development is simulating dynamic driving scenarios seeded from recorded driving logs. In pursuit of this functionality, we apply tools from discrete sequence modeling to model how vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists interact in driving scenarios. Using a simple data-driven tokenization scheme, we discretize trajectories to centimeter-level resolution using a small vocabulary. We then model the multi-agent sequence of motion tokens with a GPT-like encoder-decoder that is autoregressive in time and takes into account intra-timestep interaction between agents. Scenarios sampled from our model exhibit state-of-the-art realism; our model tops the Waymo Sim Agents Benchmark, surpassing prior work along the realism meta metric by 3.3% and along the interaction metric by 9.9%. We ablate our modeling choices in full autonomy and partial autonomy settings, and show that the representations learned by our model can quickly be adapted to improve performance on nuScenes. We additionally evaluate the scalability of our model with respect to parameter count and dataset size, and use density estimates from our model to quantify the saliency of context length and intra-timestep interaction for the traffic modeling task.

This paper does not propose any new algorithms but instead outlines various problems in the field of visual generation based on the author's personal understanding. The core of these problems lies in how to decompose visual signals, with all other issues being closely related to this central problem and stemming from unsuitable approaches to signal decomposition. This paper aims to draw researchers' attention to the significance of Visual Signal Decomposition.

The autonomous driving community has witnessed a rapid growth in approaches that embrace an end-to-end algorithm framework, utilizing raw sensor input to generate vehicle motion plans, instead of concentrating on individual tasks such as detection and motion prediction. End-to-end systems, in comparison to modular pipelines, benefit from joint feature optimization for perception and planning. This field has flourished due to the availability of large-scale datasets, closed-loop evaluation, and the increasing need for autonomous driving algorithms to perform effectively in challenging scenarios. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive analysis of more than 250 papers, covering the motivation, roadmap, methodology, challenges, and future trends in end-to-end autonomous driving. We delve into several critical challenges, including multi-modality, interpretability, causal confusion, robustness, and world models, amongst others. Additionally, we discuss current advancements in foundation models and visual pre-training, as well as how to incorporate these techniques within the end-to-end driving framework. To facilitate future research, we maintain an active repository that contains up-to-date links to relevant literature and open-source projects at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/End-to-end-Autonomous-Driving.

Human drivers rely on commonsense reasoning to navigate diverse and dynamic real-world scenarios. Existing end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving (AD) models are typically optimized to mimic driving patterns observed in data, without capturing the underlying reasoning processes. This limitation constrains their ability to handle challenging driving scenarios. To close this gap, we propose VLM-AD, a method that leverages vision-language models (VLMs) as teachers to enhance training by providing additional supervision that incorporates unstructured reasoning information and structured action labels. Such supervision enhances the model's ability to learn richer feature representations that capture the rationale behind driving patterns. Importantly, our method does not require a VLM during inference, making it practical for real-time deployment. When integrated with state-of-the-art methods, VLM-AD achieves significant improvements in planning accuracy and reduced collision rates on the nuScenes dataset.

Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have sparked interest in their use for autonomous driving, particularly in generating interpretable driving decisions through natural language. However, the assumption that VLMs inherently provide visually grounded, reliable, and interpretable explanations for driving remains largely unexamined. To address this gap, we introduce DriveBench, a benchmark dataset designed to evaluate VLM reliability across 17 settings (clean, corrupted, and text-only inputs), encompassing 19,200 frames, 20,498 question-answer pairs, three question types, four mainstream driving tasks, and a total of 12 popular VLMs. Our findings reveal that VLMs often generate plausible responses derived from general knowledge or textual cues rather than true visual grounding, especially under degraded or missing visual inputs. This behavior, concealed by dataset imbalances and insufficient evaluation metrics, poses significant risks in safety-critical scenarios like autonomous driving. We further observe that VLMs struggle with multi-modal reasoning and display heightened sensitivity to input corruptions, leading to inconsistencies in performance. To address these challenges, we propose refined evaluation metrics that prioritize robust visual grounding and multi-modal understanding. Additionally, we highlight the potential of leveraging VLMs' awareness of corruptions to enhance their reliability, offering a roadmap for developing more trustworthy and interpretable decision-making systems in real-world autonomous driving contexts. The benchmark toolkit is publicly accessible.

We present a novel approach for traffic forecasting in urban traffic scenarios using a combination of spectral graph analysis and deep learning. We predict both the low-level information (future trajectories) as well as the high-level information (road-agent behavior) from the extracted trajectory of each road-agent. Our formulation represents the proximity between the road agents using a weighted dynamic geometric graph (DGG). We use a two-stream graph-LSTM network to perform traffic forecasting using these weighted DGGs. The first stream predicts the spatial coordinates of road-agents, while the second stream predicts whether a road-agent is going to exhibit overspeeding, underspeeding, or neutral behavior by modeling spatial interactions between road-agents. Additionally, we propose a new regularization algorithm based on spectral clustering to reduce the error margin in long-term prediction (3-5 seconds) and improve the accuracy of the predicted trajectories. Moreover, we prove a theoretical upper bound on the regularized prediction error. We evaluate our approach on the Argoverse, Lyft, Apolloscape, and NGSIM datasets and highlight the benefits over prior trajectory prediction methods. In practice, our approach reduces the average prediction error by approximately 75% over prior algorithms and achieves a weighted average accuracy of 91.2% for behavior prediction. Additionally, our spectral regularization improves long-term prediction by up to 70%.

We study the class of location-scale or heteroscedastic noise models (LSNMs), in which the effect Y can be written as a function of the cause X and a noise source N independent of X, which may be scaled by a positive function g over the cause, i.e., Y = f(X) + g(X)N. Despite the generality of the model class, we show the causal direction is identifiable up to some pathological cases. To empirically validate these theoretical findings, we propose two estimators for LSNMs: an estimator based on (non-linear) feature maps, and one based on neural networks. Both model the conditional distribution of Y given X as a Gaussian parameterized by its natural parameters. When the feature maps are correctly specified, we prove that our estimator is jointly concave, and a consistent estimator for the cause-effect identification task. Although the the neural network does not inherit those guarantees, it can fit functions of arbitrary complexity, and reaches state-of-the-art performance across benchmarks.

The rapid advancements in Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS) have necessitated robust software testing to ensure safety and reliability. However, automating the generation of scalable and concrete test scenarios remains a significant challenge. Current scenario-based test case generation methods often face limitations, such as unrealistic scenes and inaccurate vehicle trajectories. These challenges largely result from the loss of map information during data extraction and the lack of an effective verification mechanism to mitigate hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). This paper introduces TRACE, a scenario-based ADS Test case Generation framework for Critical Scenarios. By leveraging multimodal data to extract challenging scenarios from real-world car crash reports, TRACE constructs numerous critical test cases with less data, significantly enhancing ADS bug detection efficiency. Using in-context learning, chain-of-thought prompting, and self-validation approaches, we use LLMs to extract environmental and road network information from crash reports. For vehicle trajectory planning, data containing map information and vehicle coordinates serves as a knowledge base to build a ChatGPT-based LLM with path-planning capabilities, which we named TrackMate. Based on 50 existing crash reports, our approach successfully tested three ADS models across two simulation platforms, MetaDrive and BeamNG. Of the 290 constructed test scenarios, 127 are identified as critical, as they resulted in vehicle collisions. Additionally, user feedback reveals that TRACE demonstrates superior scenario reconstruction accuracy, with 77.5% of the scenarios being rated as 'mostly or 'totally' consistent, compared to only 27% for the most related SOTA, LCTGen.

There is evidence that the driving style of an autonomous vehicle is important to increase the acceptance and trust of the passengers. The driving situation has been found to have a significant influence on human driving behavior. However, current driving style models only partially incorporate driving environment information, limiting the alignment between an agent and the given situation. Therefore, we propose a situation-aware driving style model based on different visual feature encoders pretrained on fleet data, as well as driving behavior predictors, which are adapted to the driving style of a specific driver. Our experiments show that the proposed method outperforms static driving styles significantly and forms plausible situation clusters. Furthermore, we found that feature encoders pretrained on our dataset lead to more precise driving behavior modeling. In contrast, feature encoders pretrained supervised and unsupervised on different data sources lead to more specific situation clusters, which can be utilized to constrain and control the driving style adaptation for specific situations. Moreover, in a real-world setting, where driving style adaptation is happening iteratively, we found the MLP-based behavior predictors achieve good performance initially but suffer from catastrophic forgetting. In contrast, behavior predictors based on situationdependent statistics can learn iteratively from continuous data streams by design. Overall, our experiments show that important information for driving behavior prediction is contained within the visual feature encoder. The dataset is publicly available at huggingface.co/datasets/jHaselberger/SADC-Situation-Awareness-for-Driver-Centric-Driving-Style-Adaptation.

With the rapid development of technology, automobiles have become an essential asset in our day-to-day lives. One of the more important researches is Traffic Signs Recognition (TSR) systems. This paper describes an approach for efficiently detecting and recognizing traffic signs in real-time, taking into account the various weather, illumination and visibility challenges through the means of transfer learning. We tackle the traffic sign detection problem using the state-of-the-art of multi-object detection systems such as Faster Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks (F-RCNN) and Single Shot Multi- Box Detector (SSD) combined with various feature extractors such as MobileNet v1 and Inception v2, and also Tiny-YOLOv2. However, the focus of this paper is going to be F-RCNN Inception v2 and Tiny YOLO v2 as they achieved the best results. The aforementioned models were fine-tuned on the German Traffic Signs Detection Benchmark (GTSDB) dataset. These models were tested on the host PC as well as Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and the TASS PreScan simulation. We will discuss the results of all the models in the conclusion section.

In autonomous driving, predicting future events in advance and evaluating the foreseeable risks empowers autonomous vehicles to better plan their actions, enhancing safety and efficiency on the road. To this end, we propose Drive-WM, the first driving world model compatible with existing end-to-end planning models. Through a joint spatial-temporal modeling facilitated by view factorization, our model generates high-fidelity multiview videos in driving scenes. Building on its powerful generation ability, we showcase the potential of applying the world model for safe driving planning for the first time. Particularly, our Drive-WM enables driving into multiple futures based on distinct driving maneuvers, and determines the optimal trajectory according to the image-based rewards. Evaluation on real-world driving datasets verifies that our method could generate high-quality, consistent, and controllable multiview videos, opening up possibilities for real-world simulations and safe planning.

A significant number of traffic crashes are secondary crashes that occur because of an earlier incident on the road. Thus, early detection of traffic incidents is crucial for road users from safety perspectives with a potential to reduce the risk of secondary crashes. The wide availability of GPS devices now-a-days gives an opportunity of tracking and recording vehicle trajectories. The objective of this study is to use vehicle trajectory data for advance real-time detection of traffic incidents on highways using machine learning-based algorithms. The study uses three days of unevenly sequenced vehicle trajectory data and traffic incident data on I-10, one of the most crash-prone highways in Louisiana. Vehicle trajectories are converted to trajectories based on virtual detector locations to maintain spatial uniformity as well as to generate historical traffic data for machine learning algorithms. Trips matched with traffic incidents on the way are separated and along with other trips with similar spatial attributes are used to build a database for modeling. Multiple machine learning algorithms such as Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Extreme Gradient Boost, and Artificial Neural Network models are used to detect a trajectory that is likely to face an incident in the downstream road section. Results suggest that the Random Forest model achieves the best performance for predicting an incident with reasonable recall value and discrimination capability.

Adapting driving behavior to new environments, customs, and laws is a long-standing problem in autonomous driving, precluding the widespread deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs). In this paper, we present LLaDA, a simple yet powerful tool that enables human drivers and autonomous vehicles alike to drive everywhere by adapting their tasks and motion plans to traffic rules in new locations. LLaDA achieves this by leveraging the impressive zero-shot generalizability of large language models (LLMs) in interpreting the traffic rules in the local driver handbook. Through an extensive user study, we show that LLaDA's instructions are useful in disambiguating in-the-wild unexpected situations. We also demonstrate LLaDA's ability to adapt AV motion planning policies in real-world datasets; LLaDA outperforms baseline planning approaches on all our metrics. Please check our website for more details: https://boyiliee.github.io/llada.

A panoptic driving perception system is an essential part of autonomous driving. A high-precision and real-time perception system can assist the vehicle in making the reasonable decision while driving. We present a panoptic driving perception network (YOLOP) to perform traffic object detection, drivable area segmentation and lane detection simultaneously. It is composed of one encoder for feature extraction and three decoders to handle the specific tasks. Our model performs extremely well on the challenging BDD100K dataset, achieving state-of-the-art on all three tasks in terms of accuracy and speed. Besides, we verify the effectiveness of our multi-task learning model for joint training via ablative studies. To our best knowledge, this is the first work that can process these three visual perception tasks simultaneously in real-time on an embedded device Jetson TX2(23 FPS) and maintain excellent accuracy. To facilitate further research, the source codes and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/hustvl/YOLOP.

Partial perception deficits can compromise autonomous vehicle safety by disrupting environmental understanding. Current protocols typically respond with immediate stops or minimal-risk maneuvers, worsening traffic flow and lacking flexibility for rare driving scenarios. In this paper, we propose LLM-RCO, a framework leveraging large language models to integrate human-like driving commonsense into autonomous systems facing perception deficits. LLM-RCO features four key modules: hazard inference, short-term motion planner, action condition verifier, and safety constraint generator. These modules interact with the dynamic driving environment, enabling proactive and context-aware control actions to override the original control policy of autonomous agents. To improve safety in such challenging conditions, we construct DriveLM-Deficit, a dataset of 53,895 video clips featuring deficits of safety-critical objects, complete with annotations for LLM-based hazard inference and motion planning fine-tuning. Extensive experiments in adverse driving conditions with the CARLA simulator demonstrate that systems equipped with LLM-RCO significantly improve driving performance, highlighting its potential for enhancing autonomous driving resilience against adverse perception deficits. Our results also show that LLMs fine-tuned with DriveLM-Deficit can enable more proactive movements instead of conservative stops in the context of perception deficits.

We introduce a recurrent neural network architecture for automated road surface wetness detection from audio of tire-surface interaction. The robustness of our approach is evaluated on 785,826 bins of audio that span an extensive range of vehicle speeds, noises from the environment, road surface types, and pavement conditions including international roughness index (IRI) values from 25 in/mi to 1400 in/mi. The training and evaluation of the model are performed on different roads to minimize the impact of environmental and other external factors on the accuracy of the classification. We achieve an unweighted average recall (UAR) of 93.2% across all vehicle speeds including 0 mph. The classifier still works at 0 mph because the discriminating signal is present in the sound of other vehicles driving by.

A 20% rise in car crashes in 2021 compared to 2020 has been observed as a result of increased distraction and drowsiness. Drowsy and distracted driving are the cause of 45% of all car crashes. As a means to decrease drowsy and distracted driving, detection methods using computer vision can be designed to be low-cost, accurate, and minimally invasive. This work investigated the use of the vision transformer to outperform state-of-the-art accuracy from 3D-CNNs. Two separate transformers were trained for drowsiness and distractedness. The drowsy video transformer model was trained on the National Tsing-Hua University Drowsy Driving Dataset (NTHU-DDD) with a Video Swin Transformer model for 10 epochs on two classes -- drowsy and non-drowsy simulated over 10.5 hours. The distracted video transformer was trained on the Driver Monitoring Dataset (DMD) with Video Swin Transformer for 50 epochs over 9 distraction-related classes. The accuracy of the drowsiness model reached 44% and a high loss value on the test set, indicating overfitting and poor model performance. Overfitting indicates limited training data and applied model architecture lacked quantifiable parameters to learn. The distracted model outperformed state-of-the-art models on DMD reaching 97.5%, indicating that with sufficient data and a strong architecture, transformers are suitable for unfit driving detection. Future research should use newer and stronger models such as TokenLearner to achieve higher accuracy and efficiency, merge existing datasets to expand to detecting drunk driving and road rage to create a comprehensive solution to prevent traffic crashes, and deploying a functioning prototype to revolutionize the automotive safety industry.

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) technology leverages fiber optic cables to detect vibrations and acoustic events, which is a promising solution for real-time traffic monitoring. In this paper, we introduce a novel methodology for detecting and tracking vehicles using DAS data, focusing on real-time processing through edge computing. Our approach applies the Hough transform to detect straight-line segments in the spatiotemporal DAS data, corresponding to vehicles crossing the Astfjord bridge in Norway. These segments are further clustered using the Density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) algorithm to consolidate multiple detections of the same vehicle, reducing noise and improving accuracy. The proposed workflow effectively counts vehicles and estimates their speed with only tens of seconds latency, enabling real-time traffic monitoring on the edge. To validate the system, we compare DAS data with simultaneous video footage, achieving high accuracy in vehicle detection, including the distinction between cars and trucks based on signal strength and frequency content. Results show that the system is capable of processing large volumes of data efficiently. We also analyze vehicle speeds and traffic patterns, identifying temporal trends and variations in traffic flow. Real-time deployment on edge devices allows immediate analysis and visualization via cloud-based platforms. In addition to traffic monitoring, the method successfully detected structural responses in the bridge, highlighting its potential use in structural health monitoring.

In the field of portrait video generation, the use of single images to generate portrait videos has become increasingly prevalent. A common approach involves leveraging generative models to enhance adapters for controlled generation. However, control signals (e.g., text, audio, reference image, pose, depth map, etc.) can vary in strength. Among these, weaker conditions often struggle to be effective due to interference from stronger conditions, posing a challenge in balancing these conditions. In our work on portrait video generation, we identified audio signals as particularly weak, often overshadowed by stronger signals such as facial pose and reference image. However, direct training with weak signals often leads to difficulties in convergence. To address this, we propose V-Express, a simple method that balances different control signals through the progressive training and the conditional dropout operation. Our method gradually enables effective control by weak conditions, thereby achieving generation capabilities that simultaneously take into account the facial pose, reference image, and audio. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively generate portrait videos controlled by audio. Furthermore, a potential solution is provided for the simultaneous and effective use of conditions of varying strengths.

Vehicles today comprise intelligent systems like connected autonomous driving and advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) to enhance the driving experience, which is enabled through increased connectivity to infrastructure and fusion of information from different sensing modes. However, the rising connectivity coupled with the legacy network architecture within vehicles can be exploited for launching active and passive attacks on critical vehicle systems and directly affecting the safety of passengers. Machine learning-based intrusion detection models have been shown to successfully detect multiple targeted attack vectors in recent literature, whose deployments are enabled through quantised neural networks targeting low-power platforms. Multiple models are often required to simultaneously detect multiple attack vectors, increasing the area, (resource) cost, and energy consumption. In this paper, we present a case for utilising custom-quantised MLP's (CQMLP) as a multi-class classification model, capable of detecting multiple attacks from the benign flow of controller area network (CAN) messages. The specific quantisation and neural architecture are determined through a joint design space exploration, resulting in our choice of the 2-bit precision and the n-layer MLP. Our 2-bit version is trained using Brevitas and optimised as a dataflow hardware model through the FINN toolflow from AMD/Xilinx, targeting an XCZU7EV device. We show that the 2-bit CQMLP model, when integrated as the IDS, can detect malicious attack messages (DoS, fuzzing, and spoofing attack) with a very high accuracy of 99.9%, on par with the state-of-the-art methods in the literature. Furthermore, the dataflow model can perform line rate detection at a latency of 0.11 ms from message reception while consuming 0.23 mJ/inference, making it ideally suited for integration with an ECU in critical CAN networks.

This paper presents the Nexar Dashcam Collision Prediction Dataset and Challenge, designed to support research in traffic event analysis, collision prediction, and autonomous vehicle safety. The dataset consists of 1,500 annotated video clips, each approximately 40 seconds long, capturing a diverse range of real-world traffic scenarios. Videos are labeled with event type (collision/near-collision vs. normal driving), environmental conditions (lighting conditions and weather), and scene type (urban, rural, highway, etc.). For collision and near-collision cases, additional temporal labels are provided, including the precise moment of the event and the alert time, marking when the collision first becomes predictable. To advance research on accident prediction, we introduce the Nexar Dashcam Collision Prediction Challenge, a public competition on top of this dataset. Participants are tasked with developing machine learning models that predict the likelihood of an imminent collision, given an input video. Model performance is evaluated using the average precision (AP) computed across multiple intervals before the accident (i.e. 500 ms, 1000 ms, and 1500 ms prior to the event), emphasizing the importance of early and reliable predictions. The dataset is released under an open license with restrictions on unethical use, ensuring responsible research and innovation.

In end-to-end autonomous driving, the utilization of existing sensor fusion techniques for imitation learning proves inadequate in challenging situations that involve numerous dynamic agents. To address this issue, we introduce LeTFuser, a transformer-based algorithm for fusing multiple RGB-D camera representations. To perform perception and control tasks simultaneously, we utilize multi-task learning. Our model comprises of two modules, the first being the perception module that is responsible for encoding the observation data obtained from the RGB-D cameras. It carries out tasks such as semantic segmentation, semantic depth cloud mapping (SDC), and traffic light state recognition. Our approach employs the Convolutional vision Transformer (CvT) wu2021cvt to better extract and fuse features from multiple RGB cameras due to local and global feature extraction capability of convolution and transformer modules, respectively. Following this, the control module undertakes the decoding of the encoded characteristics together with supplementary data, comprising a rough simulator for static and dynamic environments, as well as various measurements, in order to anticipate the waypoints associated with a latent feature space. We use two methods to process these outputs and generate the vehicular controls (e.g. steering, throttle, and brake) levels. The first method uses a PID algorithm to follow the waypoints on the fly, whereas the second one directly predicts the control policy using the measurement features and environmental state. We evaluate the model and conduct a comparative analysis with recent models on the CARLA simulator using various scenarios, ranging from normal to adversarial conditions, to simulate real-world scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/pagand/e2etransfuser/tree/cvpr-w to facilitate future studies.

Simulation forms the backbone of modern self-driving development. Simulators help develop, test, and improve driving systems without putting humans, vehicles, or their environment at risk. However, simulators face a major challenge: They rely on realistic, scalable, yet interesting content. While recent advances in rendering and scene reconstruction make great strides in creating static scene assets, modeling their layout, dynamics, and behaviors remains challenging. In this work, we turn to language as a source of supervision for dynamic traffic scene generation. Our model, LCTGen, combines a large language model with a transformer-based decoder architecture that selects likely map locations from a dataset of maps, and produces an initial traffic distribution, as well as the dynamics of each vehicle. LCTGen outperforms prior work in both unconditional and conditional traffic scene generation in terms of realism and fidelity. Code and video will be available at https://ariostgx.github.io/lctgen.

In Autonomous Driving (AD) transparency and safety are paramount, as mistakes are costly. However, neural networks used in AD systems are generally considered black boxes. As a countermeasure, we have methods of explainable AI (XAI), such as feature relevance estimation and dimensionality reduction. Coarse graining techniques can also help reduce dimensionality and find interpretable global patterns. A specific coarse graining method is Renormalization Groups from statistical physics. It has previously been applied to Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) to interpret unsupervised learning. We refine this technique by building a transparent backbone model for convolutional variational autoencoders (VAE) that allows mapping latent values to input features and has performance comparable to trained black box VAEs. Moreover, we propose a custom feature map visualization technique to analyze the internal convolutional layers in the VAE to explain internal causes of poor reconstruction that may lead to dangerous traffic scenarios in AD applications. In a second key contribution, we propose explanation and evaluation techniques for the internal dynamics and feature relevance of prediction networks. We test a long short-term memory (LSTM) network in the computer vision domain to evaluate the predictability and in future applications potentially safety of prediction models. We showcase our methods by analyzing a VAE-LSTM world model that predicts pedestrian perception in an urban traffic situation.

Steering vectors are a promising approach to control the behaviour of large language models. However, their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) may offer a potential method to interpret steering vectors, recent findings show that SAE-reconstructed vectors often lack the steering properties of the original vectors. This paper investigates why directly applying SAEs to steering vectors yields misleading decompositions, identifying two reasons: (1) steering vectors fall outside the input distribution for which SAEs are designed, and (2) steering vectors can have meaningful negative projections in feature directions, which SAEs are not designed to accommodate. These limitations hinder the direct use of SAEs for interpreting steering vectors.

World models, especially in autonomous driving, are trending and drawing extensive attention due to their capacity for comprehending driving environments. The established world model holds immense potential for the generation of high-quality driving videos, and driving policies for safe maneuvering. However, a critical limitation in relevant research lies in its predominant focus on gaming environments or simulated settings, thereby lacking the representation of real-world driving scenarios. Therefore, we introduce DriveDreamer, a pioneering world model entirely derived from real-world driving scenarios. Regarding that modeling the world in intricate driving scenes entails an overwhelming search space, we propose harnessing the powerful diffusion model to construct a comprehensive representation of the complex environment. Furthermore, we introduce a two-stage training pipeline. In the initial phase, DriveDreamer acquires a deep understanding of structured traffic constraints, while the subsequent stage equips it with the ability to anticipate future states. The proposed DriveDreamer is the first world model established from real-world driving scenarios. We instantiate DriveDreamer on the challenging nuScenes benchmark, and extensive experiments verify that DriveDreamer empowers precise, controllable video generation that faithfully captures the structural constraints of real-world traffic scenarios. Additionally, DriveDreamer enables the generation of realistic and reasonable driving policies, opening avenues for interaction and practical applications.

Recent advancements in autonomous driving have relied on data-driven approaches, which are widely adopted but face challenges including dataset bias, overfitting, and uninterpretability. Drawing inspiration from the knowledge-driven nature of human driving, we explore the question of how to instill similar capabilities into autonomous driving systems and summarize a paradigm that integrates an interactive environment, a driver agent, as well as a memory component to address this question. Leveraging large language models (LLMs) with emergent abilities, we propose the DiLu framework, which combines a Reasoning and a Reflection module to enable the system to perform decision-making based on common-sense knowledge and evolve continuously. Extensive experiments prove DiLu's capability to accumulate experience and demonstrate a significant advantage in generalization ability over reinforcement learning-based methods. Moreover, DiLu is able to directly acquire experiences from real-world datasets which highlights its potential to be deployed on practical autonomous driving systems. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to leverage knowledge-driven capability in decision-making for autonomous vehicles. Through the proposed DiLu framework, LLM is strengthened to apply knowledge and to reason causally in the autonomous driving domain. Project page: https://pjlab-adg.github.io/DiLu/

Human drivers have distinct driving techniques, knowledge, and sentiments due to unique driving traits. Driver drowsiness has been a serious issue endangering road safety; therefore, it is essential to design an effective drowsiness detection algorithm to bypass road accidents. Miscellaneous research efforts have been approached the problem of detecting anomalous human driver behaviour to examine the frontal face of the driver and automobile dynamics via computer vision techniques. Still, the conventional methods cannot capture complicated driver behaviour features. However, with the origin of deep learning architectures, a substantial amount of research has also been executed to analyze and recognize driver's drowsiness using neural network algorithms. This paper introduces a novel framework based on vision transformers and YoloV5 architectures for driver drowsiness recognition. A custom YoloV5 pre-trained architecture is proposed for face extraction with the aim of extracting Region of Interest (ROI). Owing to the limitations of previous architectures, this paper introduces vision transformers for binary image classification which is trained and validated on a public dataset UTA-RLDD. The model had achieved 96.2\% and 97.4\% as it's training and validation accuracies respectively. For the further evaluation, proposed framework is tested on a custom dataset of 39 participants in various light circumstances and achieved 95.5\% accuracy. The conducted experimentations revealed the significant potential of our framework for practical applications in smart transportation systems.

In this paper, we present a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning method for autonomous driving. Our approach employs temporal difference learning in a Bayesian framework to learn vehicle control signals from sensor data. The agent has access to images from a forward facing camera, which are preprocessed to generate semantic segmentation maps. We trained our system using both ground truth and estimated semantic segmentation input. Based on our observations from a large set of experiments, we conclude that training the system on ground truth input data leads to better performance than training the system on estimated input even if estimated input is used for evaluation. The system is trained and evaluated in a realistic simulated urban environment using the CARLA simulator. The simulator also contains a benchmark that allows for comparing to other systems and methods. The required training time of the system is shown to be lower and the performance on the benchmark superior to competing approaches.

Data-driven approaches for autonomous driving (AD) have been widely adopted in the past decade but are confronted with dataset bias and uninterpretability. Inspired by the knowledge-driven nature of human driving, recent approaches explore the potential of large language models (LLMs) to improve understanding and decision-making in traffic scenarios. They find that the pretrain-finetune paradigm of LLMs on downstream data with the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning process can enhance explainability and scene understanding. However, such a popular strategy proves to suffer from the notorious problems of misalignment between the crafted CoTs against the consequent decision-making, which remains untouched by previous LLM-based AD methods. To address this problem, we motivate an end-to-end decision-making model based on multimodality-augmented LLM, which simultaneously executes CoT reasoning and carries out planning results. Furthermore, we propose a reasoning-decision alignment constraint between the paired CoTs and planning results, imposing the correspondence between reasoning and decision-making. Moreover, we redesign the CoTs to enable the model to comprehend complex scenarios and enhance decision-making performance. We dub our proposed large language planners with reasoning-decision alignment as RDA-Driver. Experimental evaluations on the nuScenes and DriveLM-nuScenes benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our RDA-Driver in enhancing the performance of end-to-end AD systems. Specifically, our RDA-Driver achieves state-of-the-art planning performance on the nuScenes dataset with 0.80 L2 error and 0.32 collision rate, and also achieves leading results on challenging DriveLM-nuScenes benchmarks with 0.82 L2 error and 0.38 collision rate.

We model and study the processes of excitation, absorption, and transfer in various networks. The model consists of a harmonic oscillator representing a single-mode radiation field, a qubit acting as an antenna, a network through which the excitation propagates, and a qubit at the end serving as a sink. We investigate how off-resonant excitations can be optimally absorbed and transmitted through the network. Three strategies are considered: optimising network energies, adjusting the couplings between the radiation field, the antenna, and the network, or introducing and optimising driving fields at the start and end of the network. These strategies are tested on three different types of network with increasing complexity: nearest-neighbour and star configurations, and one associated with the Fenna-Matthews-Olson complex. The results show that, among the various strategies, the introduction of driving fields is the most effective, leading to a significant increase in the probability of reaching the sink in a given time. This result remains stable across networks of varying dimensionalities and types, and the driving process requires only a few parameters to be effective.

Traffic light control is important for reducing congestion in urban mobility systems. This paper proposes a real-time traffic light control method using deep Q learning. Our approach incorporates a reward function considering queue lengths, delays, travel time, and throughput. The model dynamically decides phase changes based on current traffic conditions. The training of the deep Q network involves an offline stage from pre-generated data with fixed schedules and an online stage using real-time traffic data. A deep Q network structure with a "phase gate" component is used to simplify the model's learning task under different phases. A "memory palace" mechanism is used to address sample imbalance during the training process. We validate our approach using both synthetic and real-world traffic flow data on a road intersecting in Hangzhou, China. Results demonstrate significant performance improvements of the proposed method in reducing vehicle waiting time (57.1% to 100%), queue lengths (40.9% to 100%), and total travel time (16.8% to 68.0%) compared to traditional fixed signal plans.

Driver Monitoring Systems (DMSs) are crucial for safe hand-over actions in Level-2+ self-driving vehicles. State-of-the-art DMSs leverage multiple sensors mounted at different locations to monitor the driver and the vehicle's interior scene and employ decision-level fusion to integrate these heterogenous data. However, this fusion method may not fully utilize the complementarity of different data sources and may overlook their relative importance. To address these limitations, we propose a novel multiview multimodal driver monitoring system based on feature-level fusion through multi-head self-attention (MHSA). We demonstrate its effectiveness by comparing it against four alternative fusion strategies (Sum, Conv, SE, and AFF). We also present a novel GPU-friendly supervised contrastive learning framework SuMoCo to learn better representations. Furthermore, We fine-grained the test split of the DAD dataset to enable the multi-class recognition of drivers' activities. Experiments on this enhanced database demonstrate that 1) the proposed MHSA-based fusion method (AUC-ROC: 97.0\%) outperforms all baselines and previous approaches, and 2) training MHSA with patch masking can improve its robustness against modality/view collapses. The code and annotations are publicly available.

Deep learning has led to great progress in the detection of mobile (i.e. movement-capable) objects in urban driving scenes in recent years. Supervised approaches typically require the annotation of large training sets; there has thus been great interest in leveraging weakly, semi- or self-supervised methods to avoid this, with much success. Whilst weakly and semi-supervised methods require some annotation, self-supervised methods have used cues such as motion to relieve the need for annotation altogether. However, a complete absence of annotation typically degrades their performance, and ambiguities that arise during motion grouping can inhibit their ability to find accurate object boundaries. In this paper, we propose a new self-supervised mobile object detection approach called SCT. This uses both motion cues and expected object sizes to improve detection performance, and predicts a dense grid of 3D oriented bounding boxes to improve object discovery. We significantly outperform the state-of-the-art self-supervised mobile object detection method TCR on the KITTI tracking benchmark, and achieve performance that is within 30% of the fully supervised PV-RCNN++ method for IoUs <= 0.5.

Multi-agent multi-lidar sensor fusion between connected vehicles for cooperative perception has recently been recognized as the best technique for minimizing the blind zone of individual vehicular perception systems and further enhancing the overall safety of autonomous driving systems. This technique relies heavily on the reliability and availability of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication. In practical sensor fusion application scenarios, the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) issue causes blind zones for not only the perception system but also V2X direct communication. To counteract underlying communication issues, we introduce an abstract perception matrix matching method for quick sensor fusion matching procedures and mobility-height hybrid relay determination procedures, proactively improving the efficiency and performance of V2X communication to serve the upper layer application fusion requirements. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution, we design a new simulation framework to consider autonomous driving, sensor fusion and V2X communication in general, paving the way for end-to-end performance evaluation and further solution derivation.

A map, as crucial information for downstream applications of an autonomous driving system, is usually represented in lanelines or centerlines. However, existing literature on map learning primarily focuses on either detecting geometry-based lanelines or perceiving topology relationships of centerlines. Both of these methods ignore the intrinsic relationship of lanelines and centerlines, that lanelines bind centerlines. While simply predicting both types of lane in one model is mutually excluded in learning objective, we advocate lane segment as a new representation that seamlessly incorporates both geometry and topology information. Thus, we introduce LaneSegNet, the first end-to-end mapping network generating lane segments to obtain a complete representation of the road structure. Our algorithm features two key modifications. One is a lane attention module to capture pivotal region details within the long-range feature space. Another is an identical initialization strategy for reference points, which enhances the learning of positional priors for lane attention. On the OpenLane-V2 dataset, LaneSegNet outperforms previous counterparts by a substantial gain across three tasks, i.e., map element detection (+4.8 mAP), centerline perception (+6.9 DET_l), and the newly defined one, lane segment perception (+5.6 mAP). Furthermore, it obtains a real-time inference speed of 14.7 FPS. Code is accessible at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/LaneSegNet.

The advancement in machine learning and artificial intelligence is promoting the testing and deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs) on public roads. The California Department of Motor Vehicles (CA DMV) has launched the Autonomous Vehicle Tester Program, which collects and releases reports related to Autonomous Vehicle Disengagement (AVD) from autonomous driving. Understanding the causes of AVD is critical to improving the safety and stability of the AV system and provide guidance for AV testing and deployment. In this work, a scalable end-to-end pipeline is constructed to collect, process, model, and analyze the disengagement reports released from 2014 to 2020 using natural language processing deep transfer learning. The analysis of disengagement data using taxonomy, visualization and statistical tests revealed the trends of AV testing, categorized cause frequency, and significant relationships between causes and effects of AVD. We found that (1) manufacturers tested AVs intensively during the Spring and/or Winter, (2) test drivers initiated more than 80% of the disengagement while more than 75% of the disengagement were led by errors in perception, localization & mapping, planning and control of the AV system itself, and (3) there was a significant relationship between the initiator of AVD and the cause category. This study serves as a successful practice of deep transfer learning using pre-trained models and generates a consolidated disengagement database allowing further investigation for other researchers.

Accurately depicting the complex traffic scene is a vital component for autonomous vehicles to execute correct judgments. However, existing benchmarks tend to oversimplify the scene by solely focusing on lane perception tasks. Observing that human drivers rely on both lanes and traffic signals to operate their vehicles safely, we present OpenLane-V2, the first dataset on topology reasoning for traffic scene structure. The objective of the presented dataset is to advance research in understanding the structure of road scenes by examining the relationship between perceived entities, such as traffic elements and lanes. Leveraging existing datasets, OpenLane-V2 consists of 2,000 annotated road scenes that describe traffic elements and their correlation to the lanes. It comprises three primary sub-tasks, including the 3D lane detection inherited from OpenLane, accompanied by corresponding metrics to evaluate the model's performance. We evaluate various state-of-the-art methods, and present their quantitative and qualitative results on OpenLane-V2 to indicate future avenues for investigating topology reasoning in traffic scenes.

Predicting future trajectories for other road agents is an essential task for autonomous vehicles. Established trajectory prediction methods primarily use agent tracks generated by a detection and tracking system and HD map as inputs. In this work, we propose a novel method that also incorporates visual input from surround-view cameras, allowing the model to utilize visual cues such as human gazes and gestures, road conditions, vehicle turn signals, etc, which are typically hidden from the model in prior methods. Furthermore, we use textual descriptions generated by a Vision-Language Model (VLM) and refined by a Large Language Model (LLM) as supervision during training to guide the model on what to learn from the input data. Despite using these extra inputs, our method achieves a latency of 53 ms, making it feasible for real-time processing, which is significantly faster than that of previous single-agent prediction methods with similar performance. Our experiments show that both the visual inputs and the textual descriptions contribute to improvements in trajectory prediction performance, and our qualitative analysis highlights how the model is able to exploit these additional inputs. Lastly, in this work we create and release the nuScenes-Text dataset, which augments the established nuScenes dataset with rich textual annotations for every scene, demonstrating the positive impact of utilizing VLM on trajectory prediction. Our project page is at https://moonseokha.github.io/VisionTrap/

We introduce EMMA, an End-to-end Multimodal Model for Autonomous driving. Built on a multi-modal large language model foundation, EMMA directly maps raw camera sensor data into various driving-specific outputs, including planner trajectories, perception objects, and road graph elements. EMMA maximizes the utility of world knowledge from the pre-trained large language models, by representing all non-sensor inputs (e.g. navigation instructions and ego vehicle status) and outputs (e.g. trajectories and 3D locations) as natural language text. This approach allows EMMA to jointly process various driving tasks in a unified language space, and generate the outputs for each task using task-specific prompts. Empirically, we demonstrate EMMA's effectiveness by achieving state-of-the-art performance in motion planning on nuScenes as well as competitive results on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset (WOMD). EMMA also yields competitive results for camera-primary 3D object detection on the Waymo Open Dataset (WOD). We show that co-training EMMA with planner trajectories, object detection, and road graph tasks yields improvements across all three domains, highlighting EMMA's potential as a generalist model for autonomous driving applications. However, EMMA also exhibits certain limitations: it can process only a small amount of image frames, does not incorporate accurate 3D sensing modalities like LiDAR or radar and is computationally expensive. We hope that our results will inspire further research to mitigate these issues and to further evolve the state of the art in autonomous driving model architectures.

Although Maxwell discovered the physical laws of electromagnetic waves 160 years ago, how to precisely model the propagation of an RF signal in an electrically large and complex environment remains a long-standing problem. The difficulty is in the complex interactions between the RF signal and the obstacles (e.g., reflection, diffraction, etc.). Inspired by the great success of using a neural network to describe the optical field in computer vision, we propose a neural radio-frequency radiance field, NeRF^2, which represents a continuous volumetric scene function that makes sense of an RF signal's propagation. Particularly, after training with a few signal measurements, NeRF^2 can tell how/what signal is received at any position when it knows the position of a transmitter. As a physical-layer neural network, NeRF^2 can take advantage of the learned statistic model plus the physical model of ray tracing to generate a synthetic dataset that meets the training demands of application-layer artificial neural networks (ANNs). Thus, we can boost the performance of ANNs by the proposed turbo-learning, which mixes the true and synthetic datasets to intensify the training. Our experiment results show that turbo-learning can enhance performance with an approximate 50% increase. We also demonstrate the power of NeRF^2 in the field of indoor localization and 5G MIMO.

The ability to accurately predict the trajectory of surrounding vehicles is a critical hurdle to overcome on the journey to fully autonomous vehicles. To address this challenge, we pioneer a novel behavior-aware trajectory prediction model (BAT) that incorporates insights and findings from traffic psychology, human behavior, and decision-making. Our model consists of behavior-aware, interaction-aware, priority-aware, and position-aware modules that perceive and understand the underlying interactions and account for uncertainty and variability in prediction, enabling higher-level learning and flexibility without rigid categorization of driving behavior. Importantly, this approach eliminates the need for manual labeling in the training process and addresses the challenges of non-continuous behavior labeling and the selection of appropriate time windows. We evaluate BAT's performance across the Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM), Highway Drone (HighD), Roundabout Drone (RounD), and Macao Connected Autonomous Driving (MoCAD) datasets, showcasing its superiority over prevailing state-of-the-art (SOTA) benchmarks in terms of prediction accuracy and efficiency. Remarkably, even when trained on reduced portions of the training data (25%), our model outperforms most of the baselines, demonstrating its robustness and efficiency in predicting vehicle trajectories, and the potential to reduce the amount of data required to train autonomous vehicles, especially in corner cases. In conclusion, the behavior-aware model represents a significant advancement in the development of autonomous vehicles capable of predicting trajectories with the same level of proficiency as human drivers. The project page is available at https://github.com/Petrichor625/BATraj-Behavior-aware-Model.

Nowadays, there are outstanding strides towards a future with autonomous vehicles on our roads. While the perception of autonomous vehicles performs well under closed-set conditions, they still struggle to handle the unexpected. This survey provides an extensive overview of anomaly detection techniques based on camera, lidar, radar, multimodal and abstract object level data. We provide a systematization including detection approach, corner case level, ability for an online application, and further attributes. We outline the state-of-the-art and point out current research gaps.

Current autonomous driving vehicles rely mainly on their individual sensors to understand surrounding scenes and plan for future trajectories, which can be unreliable when the sensors are malfunctioning or occluded. To address this problem, cooperative perception methods via vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication have been proposed, but they have tended to focus on detection and tracking. How those approaches contribute to overall cooperative planning performance is still under-explored. Inspired by recent progress using Large Language Models (LLMs) to build autonomous driving systems, we propose a novel problem setting that integrates an LLM into cooperative autonomous driving, with the proposed Vehicle-to-Vehicle Question-Answering (V2V-QA) dataset and benchmark. We also propose our baseline method Vehicle-to-Vehicle Large Language Model (V2V-LLM), which uses an LLM to fuse perception information from multiple connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) and answer driving-related questions: grounding, notable object identification, and planning. Experimental results show that our proposed V2V-LLM can be a promising unified model architecture for performing various tasks in cooperative autonomous driving, and outperforms other baseline methods that use different fusion approaches. Our work also creates a new research direction that can improve the safety of future autonomous driving systems. Our project website: https://eddyhkchiu.github.io/v2vllm.github.io/ .

We present SHIFT3D, a differentiable pipeline for generating 3D shapes that are structurally plausible yet challenging to 3D object detectors. In safety-critical applications like autonomous driving, discovering such novel challenging objects can offer insight into unknown vulnerabilities of 3D detectors. By representing objects with a signed distanced function (SDF), we show that gradient error signals allow us to smoothly deform the shape or pose of a 3D object in order to confuse a downstream 3D detector. Importantly, the objects generated by SHIFT3D physically differ from the baseline object yet retain a semantically recognizable shape. Our approach provides interpretable failure modes for modern 3D object detectors, and can aid in preemptive discovery of potential safety risks within 3D perception systems before these risks become critical failures.

Recent successes in autoregressive (AR) generation models, such as the GPT series in natural language processing, have motivated efforts to replicate this success in visual tasks. Some works attempt to extend this approach to autonomous driving by building video-based world models capable of generating realistic future video sequences and predicting ego states. However, prior works tend to produce unsatisfactory results, as the classic GPT framework is designed to handle 1D contextual information, such as text, and lacks the inherent ability to model the spatial and temporal dynamics essential for video generation. In this paper, we present DrivingWorld, a GPT-style world model for autonomous driving, featuring several spatial-temporal fusion mechanisms. This design enables effective modeling of both spatial and temporal dynamics, facilitating high-fidelity, long-duration video generation. Specifically, we propose a next-state prediction strategy to model temporal coherence between consecutive frames and apply a next-token prediction strategy to capture spatial information within each frame. To further enhance generalization ability, we propose a novel masking strategy and reweighting strategy for token prediction to mitigate long-term drifting issues and enable precise control. Our work demonstrates the ability to produce high-fidelity and consistent video clips of over 40 seconds in duration, which is over 2 times longer than state-of-the-art driving world models. Experiments show that, in contrast to prior works, our method achieves superior visual quality and significantly more accurate controllable future video generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/YvanYin/DrivingWorld.

As autonomous vehicles and advanced driving assistance systems have entered wider deployment, there is an increased interest in building robust perception systems using radars. Radar-based systems are lower cost and more robust to adverse weather conditions than their LiDAR-based counterparts; however the point clouds produced are typically noisy and sparse by comparison. In order to combat these challenges, recent research has focused on consuming the raw radar data, instead of the final radar point cloud. We build on this line of work and demonstrate that by bringing elements of the signal processing pipeline into our network and then pre-training on the signal processing task, we are able to achieve state of the art detection performance on the RADIal dataset. Our method uses expensive offline signal processing algorithms to pseudo-label data and trains a network to distill this information into a fast convolutional backbone, which can then be finetuned for perception tasks. Extensive experiment results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.

Modern autonomous vehicle perception systems often struggle with occlusions and limited perception range. Previous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of cooperative perception in extending the perception range and overcoming occlusions, thereby enhancing the safety of autonomous driving. In recent years, a series of cooperative perception datasets have emerged; however, these datasets primarily focus on cameras and LiDAR, neglecting 4D Radar, a sensor used in single-vehicle autonomous driving to provide robust perception in adverse weather conditions. In this paper, to bridge the gap created by the absence of 4D Radar datasets in cooperative perception, we present V2X-Radar, the first large-scale, real-world multi-modal dataset featuring 4D Radar. V2X-Radar dataset is collected using a connected vehicle platform and an intelligent roadside unit equipped with 4D Radar, LiDAR, and multi-view cameras. The collected data encompasses sunny and rainy weather conditions, spanning daytime, dusk, and nighttime, as well as various typical challenging scenarios. The dataset consists of 20K LiDAR frames, 40K camera images, and 20K 4D Radar data, including 350K annotated boxes across five categories. To support various research domains, we have established V2X-Radar-C for cooperative perception, V2X-Radar-I for roadside perception, and V2X-Radar-V for single-vehicle perception. Furthermore, we provide comprehensive benchmarks across these three sub-datasets. We will release all datasets and benchmark codebase at http://openmpd.com/column/V2X-Radar and https://github.com/yanglei18/V2X-Radar.

To optimally coordinate with others in cooperative games, it is often crucial to have information about one's collaborators: successful driving requires understanding which side of the road to drive on. However, not every feature of collaborators is strategically relevant: the fine-grained acceleration of drivers may be ignored while maintaining optimal coordination. We show that there is a well-defined dichotomy between strategically relevant and irrelevant information. Moreover, we show that, in dynamic games, this dichotomy has a compact representation that can be efficiently computed via a Bellman backup operator. We apply this algorithm to analyze the strategically relevant information for tasks in both a standard and a partially observable version of the Overcooked environment. Theoretical and empirical results show that our algorithms are significantly more efficient than baselines. Videos are available at https://minknowledge.github.io.

In the past several years, road anomaly segmentation is actively explored in the academia and drawing growing attention in the industry. The rationale behind is straightforward: if the autonomous car can brake before hitting an anomalous object, safety is promoted. However, this rationale naturally calls for a temporally informed setting while existing methods and benchmarks are designed in an unrealistic frame-wise manner. To bridge this gap, we contribute the first video anomaly segmentation dataset for autonomous driving. Since placing various anomalous objects on busy roads and annotating them in every frame are dangerous and expensive, we resort to synthetic data. To improve the relevance of this synthetic dataset to real-world applications, we train a generative adversarial network conditioned on rendering G-buffers for photorealism enhancement. Our dataset consists of 120,000 high-resolution frames at a 60 FPS framerate, as recorded in 7 different towns. As an initial benchmarking, we provide baselines using latest supervised and unsupervised road anomaly segmentation methods. Apart from conventional ones, we focus on two new metrics: temporal consistency and latencyaware streaming accuracy. We believe the latter is valuable as it measures whether an anomaly segmentation algorithm can truly prevent a car from crashing in a temporally informed setting.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), due to the remarkable visual reasoning ability to understand images and videos, have received widespread attention in the autonomous driving domain, which significantly advances the development of interpretable end-to-end autonomous driving. However, current evaluations of LVLMs primarily focus on the multi-faceted capabilities in common scenarios, lacking quantifiable and automated assessment in autonomous driving contexts, let alone severe road corner cases that even the state-of-the-art autonomous driving perception systems struggle to handle. In this paper, we propose CODA-LM, a novel vision-language benchmark for self-driving, which provides the first automatic and quantitative evaluation of LVLMs for interpretable autonomous driving including general perception, regional perception, and driving suggestions. CODA-LM utilizes the texts to describe the road images, exploiting powerful text-only large language models (LLMs) without image inputs to assess the capabilities of LVLMs in autonomous driving scenarios, which reveals stronger alignment with human preferences than LVLM judges. Experiments demonstrate that even the closed-sourced commercial LVLMs like GPT-4V cannot deal with road corner cases well, suggesting that we are still far from a strong LVLM-powered intelligent driving agent, and we hope our CODA-LM can become the catalyst to promote future development.

Lane detection, the process of identifying lane markings as approximated curves, is widely used for lane departure warning and adaptive cruise control in autonomous vehicles. The popular pipeline that solves it in two steps -- feature extraction plus post-processing, while useful, is too inefficient and flawed in learning the global context and lanes' long and thin structures. To tackle these issues, we propose an end-to-end method that directly outputs parameters of a lane shape model, using a network built with a transformer to learn richer structures and context. The lane shape model is formulated based on road structures and camera pose, providing physical interpretation for parameters of network output. The transformer models non-local interactions with a self-attention mechanism to capture slender structures and global context. The proposed method is validated on the TuSimple benchmark and shows state-of-the-art accuracy with the most lightweight model size and fastest speed. Additionally, our method shows excellent adaptability to a challenging self-collected lane detection dataset, showing its powerful deployment potential in real applications. Codes are available at https://github.com/liuruijin17/LSTR.

With deep learning and computer vision technology development, autonomous driving provides new solutions to improve traffic safety and efficiency. The importance of building high-quality datasets is self-evident, especially with the rise of end-to-end autonomous driving algorithms in recent years. Data plays a core role in the algorithm closed-loop system. However, collecting real-world data is expensive, time-consuming, and unsafe. With the development of implicit rendering technology and in-depth research on using generative models to produce data at scale, we propose OASim, an open and adaptive simulator and autonomous driving data generator based on implicit neural rendering. It has the following characteristics: (1) High-quality scene reconstruction through neural implicit surface reconstruction technology. (2) Trajectory editing of the ego vehicle and participating vehicles. (3) Rich vehicle model library that can be freely selected and inserted into the scene. (4) Rich sensors model library where you can select specified sensors to generate data. (5) A highly customizable data generation system can generate data according to user needs. We demonstrate the high quality and fidelity of the generated data through perception performance evaluation on the Carla simulator and real-world data acquisition. Code is available at https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/OASim.

Computer vision applications in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and autonomous driving (AD) have gravitated towards deep neural network architectures in recent years. While performance seems to be improving on benchmark datasets, many real-world challenges are yet to be adequately considered in research. This paper conducted an extensive literature review on the applications of computer vision in ITS and AD, and discusses challenges related to data, models, and complex urban environments. The data challenges are associated with the collection and labeling of training data and its relevance to real world conditions, bias inherent in datasets, the high volume of data needed to be processed, and privacy concerns. Deep learning (DL) models are commonly too complex for real-time processing on embedded hardware, lack explainability and generalizability, and are hard to test in real-world settings. Complex urban traffic environments have irregular lighting and occlusions, and surveillance cameras can be mounted at a variety of angles, gather dirt, shake in the wind, while the traffic conditions are highly heterogeneous, with violation of rules and complex interactions in crowded scenarios. Some representative applications that suffer from these problems are traffic flow estimation, congestion detection, autonomous driving perception, vehicle interaction, and edge computing for practical deployment. The possible ways of dealing with the challenges are also explored while prioritizing practical deployment.

Trajectory planning is commonly used as part of a local planner in autonomous driving. This paper considers the problem of planning a continuous-curvature-rate trajectory between fixed start and goal states that minimizes a tunable trade-off between passenger comfort and travel time. The problem is an instance of infinite dimensional optimization over two continuous functions: a path, and a velocity profile. We propose a simplification of this problem that facilitates the discretization of both functions. This paper also proposes a method to quickly generate minimal-length paths between start and goal states based on a single tuning parameter: the second derivative of curvature. Furthermore, we discretize the set of velocity profiles along a given path into a selection of acceleration way-points along the path. Gradient-descent is then employed to minimize cost over feasible choices of the second derivative of curvature, and acceleration way-points, resulting in a method that repeatedly solves the path and velocity profiles in an iterative fashion. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the benefits of the proposed methods.

Accurate spatial-temporal traffic flow forecasting is crucial in aiding traffic managers in implementing control measures and assisting drivers in selecting optimal travel routes. Traditional deep-learning based methods for traffic flow forecasting typically rely on historical data to train their models, which are then used to make predictions on future data. However, the performance of the trained model usually degrades due to the temporal drift between the historical and future data. To make the model trained on historical data better adapt to future data in a fully online manner, this paper conducts the first study of the online test-time adaptation techniques for spatial-temporal traffic flow forecasting problems. To this end, we propose an Adaptive Double Correction by Series Decomposition (ADCSD) method, which first decomposes the output of the trained model into seasonal and trend-cyclical parts and then corrects them by two separate modules during the testing phase using the latest observed data entry by entry. In the proposed ADCSD method, instead of fine-tuning the whole trained model during the testing phase, a lite network is attached after the trained model, and only the lite network is fine-tuned in the testing process each time a data entry is observed. Moreover, to satisfy that different time series variables may have different levels of temporal drift, two adaptive vectors are adopted to provide different weights for different time series variables. Extensive experiments on four real-world traffic flow forecasting datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ADCSD method. The code is available at https://github.com/Pengxin-Guo/ADCSD.

How should representations from complementary sensors be integrated for autonomous driving? Geometry-based sensor fusion has shown great promise for perception tasks such as object detection and motion forecasting. However, for the actual driving task, the global context of the 3D scene is key, e.g. a change in traffic light state can affect the behavior of a vehicle geometrically distant from that traffic light. Geometry alone may therefore be insufficient for effectively fusing representations in end-to-end driving models. In this work, we demonstrate that imitation learning policies based on existing sensor fusion methods under-perform in the presence of a high density of dynamic agents and complex scenarios, which require global contextual reasoning, such as handling traffic oncoming from multiple directions at uncontrolled intersections. Therefore, we propose TransFuser, a novel Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer, to integrate image and LiDAR representations using attention. We experimentally validate the efficacy of our approach in urban settings involving complex scenarios using the CARLA urban driving simulator. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art driving performance while reducing collisions by 76% compared to geometry-based fusion.

Autonomous driving and assistance systems rely on annotated data from traffic and road scenarios to model and learn the various object relations in complex real-world scenarios. Preparation and training of deploy-able deep learning architectures require the models to be suited to different traffic scenarios and adapt to different situations. Currently, existing datasets, while large-scale, lack such diversities and are geographically biased towards mainly developed cities. An unstructured and complex driving layout found in several developing countries such as India poses a challenge to these models due to the sheer degree of variations in the object types, densities, and locations. To facilitate better research toward accommodating such scenarios, we build a new dataset, IDD-3D, which consists of multi-modal data from multiple cameras and LiDAR sensors with 12k annotated driving LiDAR frames across various traffic scenarios. We discuss the need for this dataset through statistical comparisons with existing datasets and highlight benchmarks on standard 3D object detection and tracking tasks in complex layouts. Code and data available at https://github.com/shubham1810/idd3d_kit.git

While direction of arrival (DOA) of sound events is generally estimated from multichannel audio data recorded in a microphone array, sound events usually derive from visually perceptible source objects, e.g., sounds of footsteps come from the feet of a walker. This paper proposes an audio-visual sound event localization and detection (SELD) task, which uses multichannel audio and video information to estimate the temporal activation and DOA of target sound events. Audio-visual SELD systems can detect and localize sound events using signals from a microphone array and audio-visual correspondence. We also introduce an audio-visual dataset, Sony-TAu Realistic Spatial Soundscapes 2023 (STARSS23), which consists of multichannel audio data recorded with a microphone array, video data, and spatiotemporal annotation of sound events. Sound scenes in STARSS23 are recorded with instructions, which guide recording participants to ensure adequate activity and occurrences of sound events. STARSS23 also serves human-annotated temporal activation labels and human-confirmed DOA labels, which are based on tracking results of a motion capture system. Our benchmark results demonstrate the benefits of using visual object positions in audio-visual SELD tasks. The data is available at https://zenodo.org/record/7880637.

We propose GoalFlow, an end-to-end autonomous driving method for generating high-quality multimodal trajectories. In autonomous driving scenarios, there is rarely a single suitable trajectory. Recent methods have increasingly focused on modeling multimodal trajectory distributions. However, they suffer from trajectory selection complexity and reduced trajectory quality due to high trajectory divergence and inconsistencies between guidance and scene information. To address these issues, we introduce GoalFlow, a novel method that effectively constrains the generative process to produce high-quality, multimodal trajectories. To resolve the trajectory divergence problem inherent in diffusion-based methods, GoalFlow constrains the generated trajectories by introducing a goal point. GoalFlow establishes a novel scoring mechanism that selects the most appropriate goal point from the candidate points based on scene information. Furthermore, GoalFlow employs an efficient generative method, Flow Matching, to generate multimodal trajectories, and incorporates a refined scoring mechanism to select the optimal trajectory from the candidates. Our experimental results, validated on the NavsimDauner2024_navsim, demonstrate that GoalFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering robust multimodal trajectories for autonomous driving. GoalFlow achieved PDMS of 90.3, significantly surpassing other methods. Compared with other diffusion-policy-based methods, our approach requires only a single denoising step to obtain excellent performance. The code is available at https://github.com/YvanYin/GoalFlow.

Autonomous driving demands an integrated approach that encompasses perception, prediction, and planning, all while operating under strict energy constraints to enhance scalability and environmental sustainability. We present Spiking Autonomous Driving (SAD), the first unified Spiking Neural Network (SNN) to address the energy challenges faced by autonomous driving systems through its event-driven and energy-efficient nature. SAD is trained end-to-end and consists of three main modules: perception, which processes inputs from multi-view cameras to construct a spatiotemporal bird's eye view; prediction, which utilizes a novel dual-pathway with spiking neurons to forecast future states; and planning, which generates safe trajectories considering predicted occupancy, traffic rules, and ride comfort. Evaluated on the nuScenes dataset, SAD achieves competitive performance in perception, prediction, and planning tasks, while drawing upon the energy efficiency of SNNs. This work highlights the potential of neuromorphic computing to be applied to energy-efficient autonomous driving, a critical step toward sustainable and safety-critical automotive technology. Our code is available at https://github.com/ridgerchu/SAD.

Driving World Models (DWMs) have become essential for autonomous driving by enabling future scene prediction. However, existing DWMs are limited to scene generation and fail to incorporate scene understanding, which involves interpreting and reasoning about the driving environment. In this paper, we present a unified Driving World Model named HERMES. We seamlessly integrate 3D scene understanding and future scene evolution (generation) through a unified framework in driving scenarios. Specifically, HERMES leverages a Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation to consolidate multi-view spatial information while preserving geometric relationships and interactions. We also introduce world queries, which incorporate world knowledge into BEV features via causal attention in the Large Language Model (LLM), enabling contextual enrichment for understanding and generation tasks. We conduct comprehensive studies on nuScenes and OmniDrive-nuScenes datasets to validate the effectiveness of our method. HERMES achieves state-of-the-art performance, reducing generation error by 32.4% and improving understanding metrics such as CIDEr by 8.0%. The model and code will be publicly released at https://github.com/LMD0311/HERMES.

The problem of predicting driver attention from the driving perspective is gaining increasing research focus due to its remarkable significance for autonomous driving and assisted driving systems. The driving experience is extremely important for safe driving,a skilled driver is able to effortlessly predict oncoming danger (before it becomes salient) based on the driving experience and quickly pay attention to the corresponding zones.However, the nonobjective driving experience is difficult to model, so a mechanism simulating the driver experience accumulation procedure is absent in existing methods, and the current methods usually follow the technique line of saliency prediction methods to predict driver attention. In this paper, we propose a FeedBack Loop Network (FBLNet), which attempts to model the driving experience accumulation procedure. By over-and-over iterations, FBLNet generates the incremental knowledge that carries rich historically-accumulative and long-term temporal information. The incremental knowledge in our model is like the driving experience of humans. Under the guidance of the incremental knowledge, our model fuses the CNN feature and Transformer feature that are extracted from the input image to predict driver attention. Our model exhibits a solid advantage over existing methods, achieving an outstanding performance improvement on two driver attention benchmark datasets.

The ISO 26262 standard from 2016 represents the state of the art for a safety-guided development of safety-critical electric/electronic vehicle systems. These vehicle systems include advanced driver assistance systems and vehicle guidance systems. The development process proposed in the ISO 26262 standard is based upon multiple V-models, and defines activities and work products for each process step. In many of these process steps, scenario based approaches can be applied to achieve the defined work products for the development of automated driving functions. To accomplish the work products of different process steps, scenarios have to focus on various aspects like a human understandable notation or a description via time-space variables. This leads to contradictory requirements regarding the level of detail and way of notation for the representation of scenarios. In this paper, the authors present requirements for the representation of scenarios in different process steps defined by the ISO 26262 standard, propose a consistent terminology based on prior publications for the identified levels of abstraction, and demonstrate how scenarios can be systematically evolved along the phases of the development process outlined in the ISO 26262 standard.

Humans interact with the environment using a combination of perception - transforming sensory inputs from their environment into symbols, and cognition - mapping symbols to knowledge about the environment for supporting abstraction, reasoning by analogy, and long-term planning. Human perception-inspired machine perception, in the context of AI, refers to large-scale pattern recognition from raw data using neural networks trained using self-supervised learning objectives such as next-word prediction or object recognition. On the other hand, machine cognition encompasses more complex computations, such as using knowledge of the environment to guide reasoning, analogy, and long-term planning. Humans can also control and explain their cognitive functions. This seems to require the retention of symbolic mappings from perception outputs to knowledge about their environment. For example, humans can follow and explain the guidelines and safety constraints driving their decision-making in safety-critical applications such as healthcare, criminal justice, and autonomous driving. This article introduces the rapidly emerging paradigm of Neurosymbolic AI combines neural networks and knowledge-guided symbolic approaches to create more capable and flexible AI systems. These systems have immense potential to advance both algorithm-level (e.g., abstraction, analogy, reasoning) and application-level (e.g., explainable and safety-constrained decision-making) capabilities of AI systems.

Nowadays, autonomous cars can drive smoothly in ordinary cases, and it is widely recognized that realistic sensor simulation will play a critical role in solving remaining corner cases by simulating them. To this end, we propose an autonomous driving simulator based upon neural radiance fields (NeRFs). Compared with existing works, ours has three notable features: (1) Instance-aware. Our simulator models the foreground instances and background environments separately with independent networks so that the static (e.g., size and appearance) and dynamic (e.g., trajectory) properties of instances can be controlled separately. (2) Modular. Our simulator allows flexible switching between different modern NeRF-related backbones, sampling strategies, input modalities, etc. We expect this modular design to boost academic progress and industrial deployment of NeRF-based autonomous driving simulation. (3) Realistic. Our simulator set new state-of-the-art photo-realism results given the best module selection. Our simulator will be open-sourced while most of our counterparts are not. Project page: https://open-air-sun.github.io/mars/.

Recently, the diffusion model has emerged as a powerful generative technique for robotic policy learning, capable of modeling multi-mode action distributions. Leveraging its capability for end-to-end autonomous driving is a promising direction. However, the numerous denoising steps in the robotic diffusion policy and the more dynamic, open-world nature of traffic scenes pose substantial challenges for generating diverse driving actions at a real-time speed. To address these challenges, we propose a novel truncated diffusion policy that incorporates prior multi-mode anchors and truncates the diffusion schedule, enabling the model to learn denoising from anchored Gaussian distribution to the multi-mode driving action distribution. Additionally, we design an efficient cascade diffusion decoder for enhanced interaction with conditional scene context. The proposed model, DiffusionDrive, demonstrates 10times reduction in denoising steps compared to vanilla diffusion policy, delivering superior diversity and quality in just 2 steps. On the planning-oriented NAVSIM dataset, with the aligned ResNet-34 backbone, DiffusionDrive achieves 88.1 PDMS without bells and whistles, setting a new record, while running at a real-time speed of 45 FPS on an NVIDIA 4090. Qualitative results on challenging scenarios further confirm that DiffusionDrive can robustly generate diverse plausible driving actions. Code and model will be available at https://github.com/hustvl/DiffusionDrive.

Automated Vehicles (AVs) promise significant advances in transportation. Critical to these improvements is understanding AVs' longitudinal behavior, relying heavily on real-world trajectory data. Existing open-source trajectory datasets of AV, however, often fall short in refinement, reliability, and completeness, hindering effective performance metrics analysis and model development. This study addresses these challenges by creating a Unified Longitudinal TRAjectory dataset for AVs (Ultra-AV) to analyze their microscopic longitudinal driving behaviors. This dataset compiles data from 13 distinct sources, encompassing various AV types, test sites, and experiment scenarios. We established a three-step data processing: 1. extraction of longitudinal trajectory data, 2. general data cleaning, and 3. data-specific cleaning to obtain the longitudinal trajectory data and car-following trajectory data. The validity of the processed data is affirmed through performance evaluations across safety, mobility, stability, and sustainability, along with an analysis of the relationships between variables in car-following models. Our work not only furnishes researchers with standardized data and metrics for longitudinal AV behavior studies but also sets guidelines for data collection and model development.

In trajectory forecasting tasks for traffic, future output trajectories can be computed by advancing the ego vehicle's state with predicted actions according to a kinematics model. By unrolling predicted trajectories via time integration and models of kinematic dynamics, predicted trajectories should not only be kinematically feasible but also relate uncertainty from one timestep to the next. While current works in probabilistic prediction do incorporate kinematic priors for mean trajectory prediction, variance is often left as a learnable parameter, despite uncertainty in one time step being inextricably tied to uncertainty in the previous time step. In this paper, we show simple and differentiable analytical approximations describing the relationship between variance at one timestep and that at the next with the kinematic bicycle model. These approximations can be easily incorporated with negligible additional overhead into any existing trajectory forecasting framework utilizing probabilistic predictions, whether it is autoregressive or one-shot prediction. In our results, we find that encoding the relationship between variance across timesteps works especially well in unoptimal settings, such as with small or noisy datasets. We observe up to a 50% performance boost in partial dataset settings and up to an 8% performance boost in large-scale learning compared to previous kinematic prediction methods on SOTA trajectory forecasting architectures out-of-the-box, with no fine-tuning. In this paper, we show four analytical formulations of probabilistic kinematic priors which can be used for any Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based deep learning models, quantify the error bound on linear approximations applied during trajectory unrolling, and show results to evaluate each formulation in trajectory forecasting.

We investigate applying audio manipulations using pretrained neural network-based autoencoders as an alternative to traditional signal processing methods, since the former may provide greater semantic or perceptual organization. To establish the potential of this approach, we first establish if representations from these models encode information about manipulations. We carry out experiments and produce visualizations using representations from two different pretrained autoencoders. Our findings indicate that, while some information about audio manipulations is encoded, this information is both limited and encoded in a non-trivial way. This is supported by our attempts to visualize these representations, which demonstrated that trajectories of representations for common manipulations are typically nonlinear and content dependent, even for linear signal manipulations. As a result, it is not yet clear how these pretrained autoencoders can be used to manipulate audio signals, however, our results indicate this may be due to the lack of disentanglement with respect to common audio manipulations.

Despite promising progress in reinforcement learning (RL), developing algorithms for autonomous driving (AD) remains challenging: one of the critical issues being the absence of an open-source platform capable of training and effectively validating the RL policies on real-world data. We propose DriverGym, an open-source OpenAI Gym-compatible environment specifically tailored for developing RL algorithms for autonomous driving. DriverGym provides access to more than 1000 hours of expert logged data and also supports reactive and data-driven agent behavior. The performance of an RL policy can be easily validated on real-world data using our extensive and flexible closed-loop evaluation protocol. In this work, we also provide behavior cloning baselines using supervised learning and RL, trained in DriverGym. We make DriverGym code, as well as all the baselines publicly available to further stimulate development from the community.

Modern autonomous driving system is characterized as modular tasks in sequential order, i.e., perception, prediction, and planning. In order to perform a wide diversity of tasks and achieve advanced-level intelligence, contemporary approaches either deploy standalone models for individual tasks, or design a multi-task paradigm with separate heads. However, they might suffer from accumulative errors or deficient task coordination. Instead, we argue that a favorable framework should be devised and optimized in pursuit of the ultimate goal, i.e., planning of the self-driving car. Oriented at this, we revisit the key components within perception and prediction, and prioritize the tasks such that all these tasks contribute to planning. We introduce Unified Autonomous Driving (UniAD), a comprehensive framework up-to-date that incorporates full-stack driving tasks in one network. It is exquisitely devised to leverage advantages of each module, and provide complementary feature abstractions for agent interaction from a global perspective. Tasks are communicated with unified query interfaces to facilitate each other toward planning. We instantiate UniAD on the challenging nuScenes benchmark. With extensive ablations, the effectiveness of using such a philosophy is proven by substantially outperforming previous state-of-the-arts in all aspects. Code and models are public.

Recent advancements in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown promise in Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS). However, their direct application to ADS is hindered by challenges such as misunderstanding of traffic knowledge, complex road conditions, and diverse states of vehicle. To address these challenges, we propose the use of Knowledge Editing, which enables targeted modifications to a model's behavior without the need for full retraining. Meanwhile, we introduce ADS-Edit, a multimodal knowledge editing dataset specifically designed for ADS, which includes various real-world scenarios, multiple data types, and comprehensive evaluation metrics. We conduct comprehensive experiments and derive several interesting conclusions. We hope that our work will contribute to the further advancement of knowledge editing applications in the field of autonomous driving. Code and data are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyEdit.

The advent of foundation models has revolutionized the fields of natural language processing and computer vision, paving the way for their application in autonomous driving (AD). This survey presents a comprehensive review of more than 40 research papers, demonstrating the role of foundation models in enhancing AD. Large language models contribute to planning and simulation in AD, particularly through their proficiency in reasoning, code generation and translation. In parallel, vision foundation models are increasingly adapted for critical tasks such as 3D object detection and tracking, as well as creating realistic driving scenarios for simulation and testing. Multi-modal foundation models, integrating diverse inputs, exhibit exceptional visual understanding and spatial reasoning, crucial for end-to-end AD. This survey not only provides a structured taxonomy, categorizing foundation models based on their modalities and functionalities within the AD domain but also delves into the methods employed in current research. It identifies the gaps between existing foundation models and cutting-edge AD approaches, thereby charting future research directions and proposing a roadmap for bridging these gaps.

Radio frequency (RF) signal mapping, which is the process of analyzing and predicting the RF signal strength and distribution across specific areas, is crucial for cellular network planning and deployment. Traditional approaches to RF signal mapping rely on statistical models constructed based on measurement data, which offer low complexity but often lack accuracy, or ray tracing tools, which provide enhanced precision for the target area but suffer from increased computational complexity. Recently, machine learning (ML) has emerged as a data-driven method for modeling RF signal propagation, which leverages models trained on synthetic datasets to perform RF signal mapping in "unseen" areas. In this paper, we present Geo2SigMap, an ML-based framework for efficient and high-fidelity RF signal mapping using geographic databases. First, we develop an automated framework that seamlessly integrates three open-source tools: OpenStreetMap (geographic databases), Blender (computer graphics), and Sionna (ray tracing), enabling the efficient generation of large-scale 3D building maps and ray tracing models. Second, we propose a cascaded U-Net model, which is pre-trained on synthetic datasets and employed to generate detailed RF signal maps, leveraging environmental information and sparse measurement data. Finally, we evaluate the performance of Geo2SigMap via a real-world measurement campaign, where three types of user equipment (UE) collect over 45,000 data points related to cellular information from six LTE cells operating in the citizens broadband radio service (CBRS) band. Our results show that Geo2SigMap achieves an average root-mean-square-error (RMSE) of 6.04 dB for predicting the reference signal received power (RSRP) at the UE, representing an average RMSE improvement of 3.59 dB compared to existing methods.

As an initial assessment, over 480,000 labeled virtual images of normal highway driving were readily generated in Grand Theft Auto V's virtual environment. Using these images, a CNN was trained to detect following distance to cars/objects ahead, lane markings, and driving angle (angular heading relative to lane centerline): all variables necessary for basic autonomous driving. Encouraging results were obtained when tested on over 50,000 labeled virtual images from substantially different GTA-V driving environments. This initial assessment begins to define both the range and scope of the labeled images needed for training as well as the range and scope of labeled images needed for testing the definition of boundaries and limitations of trained networks. It is the efficacy and flexibility of a "GTA-V"-like virtual environment that is expected to provide an efficient well-defined foundation for the training and testing of Convolutional Neural Networks for safe driving. Additionally, described is the Princeton Virtual Environment (PVE) for the training, testing and enhancement of safe driving AI, which is being developed using the video-game engine Unity. PVE is being developed to recreate rare but critical corner cases that can be used in re-training and enhancing machine learning models and understanding the limitations of current self driving models. The Florida Tesla crash is being used as an initial reference.

The paper presents the vehicles integrated monitoring system giving priorities for emergency vehicles. The described system exploits the data gathered by: geographical positioning systems and geographical information systems. The digital maps and roadside cameras provide the dispatchers with aims for in town ambulances traffic management. The method of vehicles positioning in the city network and algorithms for ambulances recognition by image processing techniques have been discussed in the paper. These priorities are needed for an efficient life-saving actions that require the real-time controlling strategies.

Autonomous systems often operate in environments where the behavior of multiple agents is coordinated by a shared global state. Reliable estimation of the global state is thus critical for successfully operating in a multi-agent setting. We introduce agent-aware state estimation -- a framework for calculating indirect estimations of state given observations of the behavior of other agents in the environment. We also introduce transition-independent agent-aware state estimation -- a tractable class of agent-aware state estimation -- and show that it allows the speed of inference to scale linearly with the number of agents in the environment. As an example, we model traffic light classification in instances of complete loss of direct observation. By taking into account observations of vehicular behavior from multiple directions of traffic, our approach exhibits accuracy higher than that of existing traffic light-only HMM methods on a real-world autonomous vehicle data set under a variety of simulated occlusion scenarios.

Speech produced by human vocal apparatus conveys substantial non-semantic information including the gender of the speaker, voice quality, affective state, abnormalities in the vocal apparatus etc. Such information is attributed to the properties of the voice source signal, which is usually estimated from the speech signal. However, most of the source estimation techniques depend heavily on the goodness of the model assumptions and are prone to noise. A popular alternative is to indirectly obtain the source information through the Electroglottographic (EGG) signal that measures the electrical admittance around the vocal folds using dedicated hardware. In this paper, we address the problem of estimating the EGG signal directly from the speech signal, devoid of any hardware. Sampling from the intractable conditional distribution of the EGG signal given the speech signal is accomplished through optimization of an evidence lower bound. This is constructed via minimization of the KL-divergence between the true and the approximated posteriors of a latent variable learned using a deep neural auto-encoder that serves an informative prior. We demonstrate the efficacy of the method at generating the EGG signal by conducting several experiments on datasets comprising multiple speakers, voice qualities, noise settings and speech pathologies. The proposed method is evaluated on many benchmark metrics and is found to agree with the gold standard while proving better than the state-of-the-art algorithms on a few tasks such as epoch extraction.

Magnetic navigation (MagNav) is a rising alternative to the Global Positioning System (GPS) and has proven useful for aircraft navigation. Traditional aircraft navigation systems, while effective, face limitations in precision and reliability in certain environments and against attacks. Airborne MagNav leverages the Earth's magnetic field to provide accurate positional information. However, external magnetic fields induced by aircraft electronics and Earth's large-scale magnetic fields disrupt the weaker signal of interest. We introduce a physics-informed approach using Tolles-Lawson coefficients for compensation and Liquid Time-Constant Networks (LTCs) to remove complex, noisy signals derived from the aircraft's magnetic sources. Using real flight data with magnetometer measurements and aircraft measurements, we observe up to a 64% reduction in aeromagnetic compensation error (RMSE nT), outperforming conventional models. This significant improvement underscores the potential of a physics-informed, machine learning approach for extracting clean, reliable, and accurate magnetic signals for MagNav positional estimation.

Datasets drive vision progress, yet existing driving datasets are impoverished in terms of visual content and supported tasks to study multitask learning for autonomous driving. Researchers are usually constrained to study a small set of problems on one dataset, while real-world computer vision applications require performing tasks of various complexities. We construct BDD100K, the largest driving video dataset with 100K videos and 10 tasks to evaluate the exciting progress of image recognition algorithms on autonomous driving. The dataset possesses geographic, environmental, and weather diversity, which is useful for training models that are less likely to be surprised by new conditions. Based on this diverse dataset, we build a benchmark for heterogeneous multitask learning and study how to solve the tasks together. Our experiments show that special training strategies are needed for existing models to perform such heterogeneous tasks. BDD100K opens the door for future studies in this important venue.

It is commonplace to encounter heterogeneous or nonstationary data, of which the underlying generating process changes across domains or over time. Such a distribution shift feature presents both challenges and opportunities for causal discovery. In this paper, we develop a framework for causal discovery from such data, called Constraint-based causal Discovery from heterogeneous/NOnstationary Data (CD-NOD), to find causal skeleton and directions and estimate the properties of mechanism changes. First, we propose an enhanced constraint-based procedure to detect variables whose local mechanisms change and recover the skeleton of the causal structure over observed variables. Second, we present a method to determine causal orientations by making use of independent changes in the data distribution implied by the underlying causal model, benefiting from information carried by changing distributions. After learning the causal structure, next, we investigate how to efficiently estimate the "driving force" of the nonstationarity of a causal mechanism. That is, we aim to extract from data a low-dimensional representation of changes. The proposed methods are nonparametric, with no hard restrictions on data distributions and causal mechanisms, and do not rely on window segmentation. Furthermore, we find that data heterogeneity benefits causal structure identification even with particular types of confounders. Finally, we show the connection between heterogeneity/nonstationarity and soft intervention in causal discovery. Experimental results on various synthetic and real-world data sets (task-fMRI and stock market data) are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methods.

Autonomous driving requires accurate local scene understanding information. To this end, autonomous agents deploy object detection and online BEV lane graph extraction methods as a part of their perception stack. In this work, we propose an architecture and loss formulation to improve the accuracy of local lane graph estimates by using 3D object detection outputs. The proposed method learns to assign the objects to centerlines by considering the centerlines as cluster centers and the objects as data points to be assigned a probability distribution over the cluster centers. This training scheme ensures direct supervision on the relationship between lanes and objects, thus leading to better performance. The proposed method improves lane graph estimation substantially over state-of-the-art methods. The extensive ablations show that our method can achieve significant performance improvements by using the outputs of existing 3D object detection methods. Since our method uses the detection outputs rather than detection method intermediate representations, a single model of our method can use any detection method at test time.

Catastrophic regime shifts in complex natural systems may be averted through advanced detection. Recent work has provided a proof-of-principle that many systems approaching a catastrophic transition may be identified through the lens of early warning indicators such as rising variance or increased return times. Despite widespread appreciation of the difficulties and uncertainty involved in such forecasts, proposed methods hardly ever characterize their expected error rates. Without the benefits of replicates, controls, or hindsight, applications of these approaches must quantify how reliable different indicators are in avoiding false alarms, and how sensitive they are to missing subtle warning signs. We propose a model based approach in order to quantify this trade-off between reliability and sensitivity and allow comparisons between different indicators. We show these error rates can be quite severe for common indicators even under favorable assumptions, and also illustrate how a model-based indicator can improve this performance. We demonstrate how the performance of an early warning indicator varies in different data sets, and suggest that uncertainty quantification become a more central part of early warning predictions.

Recent progress in image generation has sparked research into controlling these models through condition signals, with various methods addressing specific challenges in conditional generation. Instead of proposing another specialized technique, we introduce a simple, unified framework to handle diverse conditional generation tasks involving a specific image-condition correlation. By learning a joint distribution over a correlated image pair (e.g. image and depth) with a diffusion model, our approach enables versatile capabilities via different inference-time sampling schemes, including controllable image generation (e.g. depth to image), estimation (e.g. image to depth), signal guidance, joint generation (image & depth), and coarse control. Previous attempts at unification often introduce significant complexity through multi-stage training, architectural modification, or increased parameter counts. In contrast, our simple formulation requires a single, computationally efficient training stage, maintains the standard model input, and adds minimal learned parameters (15% of the base model). Moreover, our model supports additional capabilities like non-spatially aligned and coarse conditioning. Extensive results show that our single model can produce comparable results with specialized methods and better results than prior unified methods. We also demonstrate that multiple models can be effectively combined for multi-signal conditional generation.

It is known that human speech and certain animal vocalizations can convey meaningful content because we can decipher the content that a given utterance does convey. This paper explores an alternative approach to determining whether a signal is meaningful, one that analyzes only the signal itself and is independent of what the conveyed meaning might be. We devise a method that takes a waveform as input and outputs a score indicating its degree of `meaningfulness`. We cluster contiguous portions of the input to minimize the total description length, and then take the length of the code of the assigned cluster labels as meaningfulness score. We evaluate our method empirically, against several baselines, and show that it is the only one to give a high score to human speech in various languages and with various speakers, a moderate score to animal vocalizations from birds and orcas, and a low score to ambient noise from various sources.

Autonomous Driving Systems (ADSs) are revolutionizing transportation by reducing human intervention, improving operational efficiency, and enhancing safety. Large Language Models (LLMs), known for their exceptional planning and reasoning capabilities, have been integrated into ADSs to assist with driving decision-making. However, LLM-based single-agent ADSs face three major challenges: limited perception, insufficient collaboration, and high computational demands. To address these issues, recent advancements in LLM-based multi-agent ADSs have focused on improving inter-agent communication and cooperation. This paper provides a frontier survey of LLM-based multi-agent ADSs. We begin with a background introduction to related concepts, followed by a categorization of existing LLM-based approaches based on different agent interaction modes. We then discuss agent-human interactions in scenarios where LLM-based agents engage with humans. Finally, we summarize key applications, datasets, and challenges in this field to support future research (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LLM-based_Multi-agent_ADS-3A5C/README.md).

Predicting attention regions of interest is an important yet challenging task for self-driving systems. Existing methodologies rely on large-scale labeled traffic datasets that are labor-intensive to obtain. Besides, the huge domain gap between natural scenes and traffic scenes in current datasets also limits the potential for model training. To address these challenges, we are the first to introduce an unsupervised way to predict self-driving attention by uncertainty modeling and driving knowledge integration. Our approach's Uncertainty Mining Branch (UMB) discovers commonalities and differences from multiple generated pseudo-labels achieved from models pre-trained on natural scenes by actively measuring the uncertainty. Meanwhile, our Knowledge Embedding Block (KEB) bridges the domain gap by incorporating driving knowledge to adaptively refine the generated pseudo-labels. Quantitative and qualitative results with equivalent or even more impressive performance compared to fully-supervised state-of-the-art approaches across all three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and the potential of this direction. The code will be made publicly available.

Human-level driving is an ultimate goal of autonomous driving. Conventional approaches formulate autonomous driving as a perception-prediction-planning framework, yet their systems do not capitalize on the inherent reasoning ability and experiential knowledge of humans. In this paper, we propose a fundamental paradigm shift from current pipelines, exploiting Large Language Models (LLMs) as a cognitive agent to integrate human-like intelligence into autonomous driving systems. Our approach, termed Agent-Driver, transforms the traditional autonomous driving pipeline by introducing a versatile tool library accessible via function calls, a cognitive memory of common sense and experiential knowledge for decision-making, and a reasoning engine capable of chain-of-thought reasoning, task planning, motion planning, and self-reflection. Powered by LLMs, our Agent-Driver is endowed with intuitive common sense and robust reasoning capabilities, thus enabling a more nuanced, human-like approach to autonomous driving. We evaluate our approach on the large-scale nuScenes benchmark, and extensive experiments substantiate that our Agent-Driver significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art driving methods by a large margin. Our approach also demonstrates superior interpretability and few-shot learning ability to these methods. Code will be released.

Deep learning has become an area of interest in most scientific areas, including physical sciences. Modern networks apply real-valued transformations on the data. Particularly, convolutions in convolutional neural networks discard phase information entirely. Many deterministic signals, such as seismic data or electrical signals, contain significant information in the phase of the signal. We explore complex-valued deep convolutional networks to leverage non-linear feature maps. Seismic data commonly has a lowcut filter applied, to attenuate noise from ocean waves and similar long wavelength contributions. Discarding the phase information leads to low-frequency aliasing analogous to the Nyquist-Shannon theorem for high frequencies. In non-stationary data, the phase content can stabilize training and improve the generalizability of neural networks. While it has been shown that phase content can be restored in deep neural networks, we show how including phase information in feature maps improves both training and inference from deterministic physical data. Furthermore, we show that the reduction of parameters in a complex network outperforms larger real-valued networks.

The evolution of wireless communications into 6G and beyond is expected to rely on new machine learning (ML)-based capabilities. These can enable proactive decisions and actions from wireless-network components to sustain quality-of-service (QoS) and user experience. Moreover, new use cases in the area of vehicular and industrial communications will emerge. Specifically in the area of vehicle communication, vehicle-to-everything (V2X) schemes will benefit strongly from such advances. With this in mind, we have conducted a detailed measurement campaign that paves the way to a plethora of diverse ML-based studies. The resulting datasets offer GPS-located wireless measurements across diverse urban environments for both cellular (with two different operators) and sidelink radio access technologies, thus enabling a variety of different studies towards V2X. The datasets are labeled and sampled with a high time resolution. Furthermore, we make the data publicly available with all the necessary information to support the onboarding of new researchers. We provide an initial analysis of the data showing some of the challenges that ML needs to overcome and the features that ML can leverage, as well as some hints at potential research studies.

The rapid urbanization of cities and increasing vehicular congestion have posed significant challenges to traffic management and safety. This study explores the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine vision technologies in revolutionizing traffic systems. By leveraging advanced surveillance cameras and deep learning algorithms, this research proposes a system for real-time detection of vehicles, traffic anomalies, and driver behaviors. The system integrates geospatial and weather data to adapt dynamically to environmental conditions, ensuring robust performance in diverse scenarios. Using YOLOv8 and YOLOv11 models, the study achieves high accuracy in vehicle detection and anomaly recognition, optimizing traffic flow and enhancing road safety. These findings contribute to the development of intelligent traffic management solutions and align with the vision of creating smart cities with sustainable and efficient urban infrastructure.

Autonomous driving promises transformative improvements to transportation, but building systems capable of safely navigating the unstructured complexity of real-world scenarios remains challenging. A critical problem lies in effectively predicting the various potential outcomes that may emerge in response to the vehicle's actions as the world evolves. To address this challenge, we introduce GAIA-1 ('Generative AI for Autonomy'), a generative world model that leverages video, text, and action inputs to generate realistic driving scenarios while offering fine-grained control over ego-vehicle behavior and scene features. Our approach casts world modeling as an unsupervised sequence modeling problem by mapping the inputs to discrete tokens, and predicting the next token in the sequence. Emerging properties from our model include learning high-level structures and scene dynamics, contextual awareness, generalization, and understanding of geometry. The power of GAIA-1's learned representation that captures expectations of future events, combined with its ability to generate realistic samples, provides new possibilities for innovation in the field of autonomy, enabling enhanced and accelerated training of autonomous driving technology.

Existing datasets for autonomous driving (AD) often lack diversity and long-range capabilities, focusing instead on 360{\deg} perception and temporal reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce Zenseact Open Dataset (ZOD), a large-scale and diverse multimodal dataset collected over two years in various European countries, covering an area 9x that of existing datasets. ZOD boasts the highest range and resolution sensors among comparable datasets, coupled with detailed keyframe annotations for 2D and 3D objects (up to 245m), road instance/semantic segmentation, traffic sign recognition, and road classification. We believe that this unique combination will facilitate breakthroughs in long-range perception and multi-task learning. The dataset is composed of Frames, Sequences, and Drives, designed to encompass both data diversity and support for spatio-temporal learning, sensor fusion, localization, and mapping. Frames consist of 100k curated camera images with two seconds of other supporting sensor data, while the 1473 Sequences and 29 Drives include the entire sensor suite for 20 seconds and a few minutes, respectively. ZOD is the only large-scale AD dataset released under a permissive license, allowing for both research and commercial use. The dataset is accompanied by an extensive development kit. Data and more information are available online (https://zod.zenseact.com).

As multimodal foundational models start being deployed experimentally in Self-Driving cars, a reasonable question we ask ourselves is how similar to humans do these systems respond in certain driving situations -- especially those that are out-of-distribution? To study this, we create the Robusto-1 dataset that uses dashcam video data from Peru, a country with one of the worst (aggressive) drivers in the world, a high traffic index, and a high ratio of bizarre to non-bizarre street objects likely never seen in training. In particular, to preliminarly test at a cognitive level how well Foundational Visual Language Models (VLMs) compare to Humans in Driving, we move away from bounding boxes, segmentation maps, occupancy maps or trajectory estimation to multi-modal Visual Question Answering (VQA) comparing both humans and machines through a popular method in systems neuroscience known as Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA). Depending on the type of questions we ask and the answers these systems give, we will show in what cases do VLMs and Humans converge or diverge allowing us to probe on their cognitive alignment. We find that the degree of alignment varies significantly depending on the type of questions asked to each type of system (Humans vs VLMs), highlighting a gap in their alignment.

Recent work by Baratin et al. (2021) sheds light on an intriguing pattern that occurs during the training of deep neural networks: some layers align much more with data compared to other layers (where the alignment is defined as the euclidean product of the tangent features matrix and the data labels matrix). The curve of the alignment as a function of layer index (generally) exhibits an ascent-descent pattern where the maximum is reached for some hidden layer. In this work, we provide the first explanation for this phenomenon. We introduce the Equilibrium Hypothesis which connects this alignment pattern to signal propagation in deep neural networks. Our experiments demonstrate an excellent match with the theoretical predictions.

SLEDGE is the first generative simulator for vehicle motion planning trained on real-world driving logs. Its core component is a learned model that is able to generate agent bounding boxes and lane graphs. The model's outputs serve as an initial state for traffic simulation. The unique properties of the entities to be generated for SLEDGE, such as their connectivity and variable count per scene, render the naive application of most modern generative models to this task non-trivial. Therefore, together with a systematic study of existing lane graph representations, we introduce a novel raster-to-vector autoencoder (RVAE). It encodes agents and the lane graph into distinct channels in a rasterized latent map. This facilitates both lane-conditioned agent generation and combined generation of lanes and agents with a Diffusion Transformer. Using generated entities in SLEDGE enables greater control over the simulation, e.g. upsampling turns or increasing traffic density. Further, SLEDGE can support 500m long routes, a capability not found in existing data-driven simulators like nuPlan. It presents new challenges for planning algorithms, evidenced by failure rates of over 40% for PDM, the winner of the 2023 nuPlan challenge, when tested on hard routes and dense traffic generated by our model. Compared to nuPlan, SLEDGE requires 500times less storage to set up (<4GB), making it a more accessible option and helping with democratizing future research in this field.

We introduce and study the problem of detecting whether an agent is updating their prior beliefs given new evidence in an optimal way that is Bayesian, or whether they are biased towards their own prior. In our model, biased agents form posterior beliefs that are a convex combination of their prior and the Bayesian posterior, where the more biased an agent is, the closer their posterior is to the prior. Since we often cannot observe the agent's beliefs directly, we take an approach inspired by information design. Specifically, we measure an agent's bias by designing a signaling scheme and observing the actions they take in response to different signals, assuming that they are maximizing their own expected utility; our goal is to detect bias with a minimum number of signals. Our main results include a characterization of scenarios where a single signal suffices and a computationally efficient algorithm to compute optimal signaling schemes.

In the field of autonomous driving, there have been many excellent perception models for object detection, semantic segmentation, and other tasks, but how can we effectively use the perception models for vehicle planning? Traditional autonomous vehicle trajectory prediction methods not only need to obey traffic rules to avoid collisions, but also need to follow the prescribed route to reach the destination. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based trajectory prediction network for end-to-end autonomous driving without rules called Target-point Attention Transformer network (TAT). We use the attention mechanism to realize the interaction between the predicted trajectory and the perception features as well as target-points. We demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing conditional imitation learning and GRU-based methods, significantly reducing the occurrence of accidents and improving route completion. We evaluate our approach in complex closed loop driving scenarios in cities using the CARLA simulator and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Navigating safely and efficiently in dense and heterogeneous traffic scenarios is challenging for autonomous vehicles (AVs) due to their inability to infer the behaviors or intentions of nearby drivers. In this work, we introduce a distributed multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithm that can predict trajectories and intents in dense and heterogeneous traffic scenarios. Our approach for intent-aware planning, iPLAN, allows agents to infer nearby drivers' intents solely from their local observations. We model two distinct incentives for agents' strategies: Behavioral Incentive for high-level decision-making based on their driving behavior or personality and Instant Incentive for motion planning for collision avoidance based on the current traffic state. Our approach enables agents to infer their opponents' behavior incentives and integrate this inferred information into their decision-making and motion-planning processes. We perform experiments on two simulation environments, Non-Cooperative Navigation and Heterogeneous Highway. In Heterogeneous Highway, results show that, compared with centralized training decentralized execution (CTDE) MARL baselines such as QMIX and MAPPO, our method yields a 4.3% and 38.4% higher episodic reward in mild and chaotic traffic, with 48.1% higher success rate and 80.6% longer survival time in chaotic traffic. We also compare with a decentralized training decentralized execution (DTDE) baseline IPPO and demonstrate a higher episodic reward of 12.7% and 6.3% in mild traffic and chaotic traffic, 25.3% higher success rate, and 13.7% longer survival time.