Dawei Zhao

Chen Min, Weizhong Jiang, Dawei Zhao et al.

Freespace detection is an essential component of autonomous driving technology and plays an important role in trajectory planning. In the last decade, deep learning-based free space detection methods have been proved feasible. However, these efforts were focused on urban road environments and few deep learning-based methods were specifically designed for off-road free space detection due to the lack of off-road benchmarks. In this paper, we present the ORFD dataset, which, to our knowledge, is the first off-road free space detection dataset. The dataset was collected in different scenes (woodland, farmland, grassland, and countryside), different weather conditions (sunny, rainy, foggy, and snowy), and different light conditions (bright light, daylight, twilight, darkness), which totally contains 12,198 LiDAR point cloud and RGB image pairs with the traversable area, non-traversable area and unreachable area annotated in detail. We propose a novel network named OFF-Net, which unifies Transformer architecture to aggregate local and global information, to meet the requirement of large receptive fields for free space detection tasks. We also propose the cross-attention to dynamically fuse LiDAR and RGB image information for accurate off-road free space detection. Dataset and code are publicly available athttps://github.com/chaytonmin/OFF-Net.

Chen Min, Xinli Xu, Dawei Zhao et al.

Current perception models in autonomous driving heavily rely on large-scale labelled 3D data, which is both costly and time-consuming to annotate. This work proposes a solution to reduce the dependence on labelled 3D training data by leveraging pre-training on large-scale unlabeled outdoor LiDAR point clouds using masked autoencoders (MAE). While existing masked point autoencoding methods mainly focus on small-scale indoor point clouds or pillar-based large-scale outdoor LiDAR data, our approach introduces a new self-supervised masked occupancy pre-training method called Occupancy-MAE, specifically designed for voxel-based large-scale outdoor LiDAR point clouds. Occupancy-MAE takes advantage of the gradually sparse voxel occupancy structure of outdoor LiDAR point clouds and incorporates a range-aware random masking strategy and a pretext task of occupancy prediction. By randomly masking voxels based on their distance to the LiDAR and predicting the masked occupancy structure of the entire 3D surrounding scene, Occupancy-MAE encourages the extraction of high-level semantic information to reconstruct the masked voxel using only a small number of visible voxels. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Occupancy-MAE across several downstream tasks. For 3D object detection, Occupancy-MAE reduces the labelled data required for car detection on the KITTI dataset by half and improves small object detection by approximately 2% in AP on the Waymo dataset. For 3D semantic segmentation, Occupancy-MAE outperforms training from scratch by around 2% in mIoU. For multi-object tracking, Occupancy-MAE enhances training from scratch by approximately 1% in terms of AMOTA and AMOTP. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/chaytonmin/Occupancy-MAE.

Chen Min, Dawei Zhao, Liang Xiao et al.

In this paper, we draw inspiration from Alberto Elfes' pioneering work in 1989, where he introduced the concept of the occupancy grid as World Models for robots. We imbue the robot with a spatial-temporal world model, termed UniWorld, to perceive its surroundings and predict the future behavior of other participants. UniWorld involves initially predicting 4D geometric occupancy as the World Models for foundational stage and subsequently fine-tuning on downstream tasks. UniWorld can estimate missing information concerning the world state and predict plausible future states of the world. Besides, UniWorld's pre-training process is label-free, enabling the utilization of massive amounts of image-LiDAR pairs to build a Foundational Model.The proposed unified pre-training framework demonstrates promising results in key tasks such as motion prediction, multi-camera 3D object detection, and surrounding semantic scene completion. When compared to monocular pre-training methods on the nuScenes dataset, UniWorld shows a significant improvement of about 1.5% in IoU for motion prediction, 2.0% in mAP and 2.0% in NDS for multi-camera 3D object detection, as well as a 3% increase in mIoU for surrounding semantic scene completion. By adopting our unified pre-training method, a 25% reduction in 3D training annotation costs can be achieved, offering significant practical value for the implementation of real-world autonomous driving. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/chaytonmin/UniWorld.

Liang Xiao, Jiaolong Xu, Dawei Zhao et al. · berkeley

Data augmentation has been widely used to improve generalization in training deep neural networks. Recent works show that using worst-case transformations or adversarial augmentation strategies can significantly improve the accuracy and robustness. However, due to the non-differentiable properties of image transformations, searching algorithms such as reinforcement learning or evolution strategy have to be applied, which are not computationally practical for large scale problems. In this work, we show that by simply applying consistency training with random data augmentation, state-of-the-art results on domain adaptation (DA) and generalization (DG) can be obtained. To further improve the accuracy and robustness with adversarial examples, we propose a differentiable adversarial data augmentation method based on spatial transformer networks (STN). The combined adversarial and random transformations based method outperforms the state-of-the-art on multiple DA and DG benchmark datasets. Besides, the proposed method shows desirable robustness to corruption, which is also validated on commonly used datasets.

Yucheng Xin, Dawei Zhao, Xiang Chen et al.

Ultra-high-definition (UHD) image deblurring poses significant challenges for UHD restoration methods, which must balance fine-grained detail recovery and practical inference efficiency. Although prominent discriminative and generative methods have achieved remarkable results, a trade-off persists between computational cost and the ability to generate fine-grained detail for UHD image deblurring tasks. To further alleviate these issues, we propose a novel autoregressive flow method for UHD image deblurring with an ill-conditioned constraint. Our core idea is to decompose UHD restoration into a progressive, coarse-to-fine process: at each scale, the sharp estimate is formed by upsampling the previous-scale result and adding a current-scale residual, enabling stable, stage-wise refinement from low to high resolution. We further introduce Flow Matching to model residual generation as a conditional vector field and perform few-step ODE sampling with efficient Euler/Heun solvers, enriching details while keeping inference affordable. Since multi-step generation at UHD can be numerically unstable, we propose an ill-conditioning suppression scheme by imposing condition-number regularization on a feature-induced attention matrix, improving convergence and cross-scale consistency. Our method demonstrates promising performance on blurred images at 4K (3840$\times$2160) or higher resolutions.

Chen Min, Chengyang Li, Fanjie Kong et al.

This paper presents GenDet, a novel framework that redefines object detection as an image generation task. In contrast to traditional approaches, GenDet adopts a pioneering approach by leveraging generative modeling: it conditions on the input image and directly generates bounding boxes with semantic annotations in the original image space. GenDet establishes a conditional generation architecture built upon the large-scale pre-trained Stable Diffusion model, formulating the detection task as semantic constraints within the latent space. It enables precise control over bounding box positions and category attributes, while preserving the flexibility of the generative model. This novel methodology effectively bridges the gap between generative models and discriminative tasks, providing a fresh perspective for constructing unified visual understanding systems. Systematic experiments demonstrate that GenDet achieves competitive accuracy compared to discriminative detectors, while retaining the flexibility characteristic of generative methods.

Qifeng Liu, Dawei Zhao, Yabo Dong et al.

Recent advances in point cloud object detection have increasingly adopted Transformer-based and State Space Models (SSMs), demonstrating strong performance. However, voxelbased representations in these models require strict consistency in input and output dimensions due to their serialized processing, which limits the spatial diffusion capability typically offered by convolutional operations. This limitation significantly affects detection accuracy. Inspired by CNN-based object detection architectures, we propose a novel Voxel Diffusion Module (VDM) to enhance voxel-level representation and diffusion in point cloud data. VDM is composed of sparse 3D convolutions, submanifold sparse convolutions, and residual connections. To ensure computational efficiency, the output feature maps are downsampled to one-fourth of the original input resolution. VDM serves two primary functions: (1) diffusing foreground voxel features through sparse 3D convolutions to enrich spatial context, and (2) aggregating fine-grained spatial information to strengthen voxelwise feature representation. The enhanced voxel features produced by VDM can be seamlessly integrated into mainstream Transformer- or SSM-based detection models for accurate object classification and localization, highlighting the generalizability of our method. We evaluate VDM on several benchmark datasets by embedding it into both Transformerbased and SSM-based models. Experimental results show that our approach consistently improves detection accuracy over baseline models. Specifically, VDM-SSMs achieve 74.7 mAPH (L2) on Waymo, 72.9 NDS on nuScenes, 42.3 mAP on Argoverse 2, and 67.6 mAP on ONCE, setting new stateof-the-art performance across all datasets. Our code will be made publicly available.

Zheng Zhu, Xiaofeng Wang, Wangbo Zhao et al.

General world models represent a crucial pathway toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), serving as the cornerstone for various applications ranging from virtual environments to decision-making systems. Recently, the emergence of the Sora model has attained significant attention due to its remarkable simulation capabilities, which exhibits an incipient comprehension of physical laws. In this survey, we embark on a comprehensive exploration of the latest advancements in world models. Our analysis navigates through the forefront of generative methodologies in video generation, where world models stand as pivotal constructs facilitating the synthesis of highly realistic visual content. Additionally, we scrutinize the burgeoning field of autonomous-driving world models, meticulously delineating their indispensable role in reshaping transportation and urban mobility. Furthermore, we delve into the intricacies inherent in world models deployed within autonomous agents, shedding light on their profound significance in enabling intelligent interactions within dynamic environmental contexts. At last, we examine challenges and limitations of world models, and discuss their potential future directions. We hope this survey can serve as a foundational reference for the research community and inspire continued innovation. This survey will be regularly updated at: https://github.com/GigaAI-research/General-World-Models-Survey.

Chen Min, Liang Xiao, Dawei Zhao et al.

Multi-camera 3D perception has emerged as a prominent research field in autonomous driving, offering a viable and cost-effective alternative to LiDAR-based solutions. The existing multi-camera algorithms primarily rely on monocular 2D pre-training. However, the monocular 2D pre-training overlooks the spatial and temporal correlations among the multi-camera system. To address this limitation, we propose the first multi-camera unified pre-training framework, called UniScene, which involves initially reconstructing the 3D scene as the foundational stage and subsequently fine-tuning the model on downstream tasks. Specifically, we employ Occupancy as the general representation for the 3D scene, enabling the model to grasp geometric priors of the surrounding world through pre-training. A significant benefit of UniScene is its capability to utilize a considerable volume of unlabeled image-LiDAR pairs for pre-training purposes. The proposed multi-camera unified pre-training framework demonstrates promising results in key tasks such as multi-camera 3D object detection and surrounding semantic scene completion. When compared to monocular pre-training methods on the nuScenes dataset, UniScene shows a significant improvement of about 2.0% in mAP and 2.0% in NDS for multi-camera 3D object detection, as well as a 3% increase in mIoU for surrounding semantic scene completion. By adopting our unified pre-training method, a 25% reduction in 3D training annotation costs can be achieved, offering significant practical value for the implementation of real-world autonomous driving. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/chaytonmin/UniScene.

Jiaolong Xu, Liang Xiao, Dawei Zhao et al.

State-of-the-art autonomous driving systems rely on high definition (HD) maps for localization and navigation. However, building and maintaining HD maps is time-consuming and expensive. Furthermore, the HD maps assume structured environment such as the existence of major road and lanes, which are not present in rural areas. In this work, we propose an end-to-end transformer networks based approach for map-less autonomous driving. The proposed model takes raw LiDAR data and noisy topometric map as input and produces precise local trajectory for navigation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in real-world driving data, including both urban and rural areas. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal methods and is robust to the perturbations of the topometric map. The code of the proposed method is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/Jiaolong/trajectory-prediction}.

Chen Min, Jiaolong Xu, Liang Xiao et al.

Deep learning has recently demonstrated its promising performance for vision-based parking-slot detection. However, very few existing methods explicitly take into account learning the link information of the marking-points, resulting in complex post-processing and erroneous detection. In this paper, we propose an attentional graph neural network based parking-slot detection method, which refers the marking-points in an around-view image as graph-structured data and utilize graph neural network to aggregate the neighboring information between marking-points. Without any manually designed post-processing, the proposed method is end-to-end trainable. Extensive experiments have been conducted on public benchmark dataset, where the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy. Code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/Jiaolong/gcn-parking-slot}.

Chen Min, Dawei Zhao, Liang Xiao et al.

Vision-centric autonomous driving has recently raised wide attention due to its lower cost. Pre-training is essential for extracting a universal representation. However, current vision-centric pre-training typically relies on either 2D or 3D pre-text tasks, overlooking the temporal characteristics of autonomous driving as a 4D scene understanding task. In this paper, we address this challenge by introducing a world model-based autonomous driving 4D representation learning framework, dubbed \emph{DriveWorld}, which is capable of pre-training from multi-camera driving videos in a spatio-temporal fashion. Specifically, we propose a Memory State-Space Model for spatio-temporal modelling, which consists of a Dynamic Memory Bank module for learning temporal-aware latent dynamics to predict future changes and a Static Scene Propagation module for learning spatial-aware latent statics to offer comprehensive scene contexts. We additionally introduce a Task Prompt to decouple task-aware features for various downstream tasks. The experiments demonstrate that DriveWorld delivers promising results on various autonomous driving tasks. When pre-trained with the OpenScene dataset, DriveWorld achieves a 7.5% increase in mAP for 3D object detection, a 3.0% increase in IoU for online mapping, a 5.0% increase in AMOTA for multi-object tracking, a 0.1m decrease in minADE for motion forecasting, a 3.0% increase in IoU for occupancy prediction, and a 0.34m reduction in average L2 error for planning.

Xiaohan Wang, Chen Wu, Dawei Zhao et al.

Considering efficiency, ultra-high-definition (UHD) low-light image restoration is extremely challenging. Existing methods based on Transformer architectures or high-dimensional complex convolutional neural networks often suffer from the "memory wall" bottleneck, failing to achieve millisecond-level inference on edge devices. To address this issue, we propose a novel real-time UHD low-light enhancement network based on geometric feature fusion using Clifford algebra in 2D Euclidean space. First, we construct a four-layer feature pyramid with gradually increasing resolution, which decomposes input images into low-frequency and high-frequency structural components via a Gaussian blur kernel, and adopts a lightweight U-Net based on depthwise separable convolution for dual-branch feature extraction. Second, to resolve structural information loss and artifacts from traditional high-low frequency feature fusion, we introduce spatially aware Clifford algebra, which maps feature tensors to a multivector space (scalars, vectors, bivectors) and uses Clifford similarity to aggregate features while suppressing noise and preserving textures. In the reconstruction stage, the network outputs adaptive Gamma and Gain maps, which perform physically constrained non-linear brightness adjustment via Retinex theory. Integrated with FP16 mixed-precision computation and dynamic operator fusion, our method achieves millisecond-level inference for 4K/8K images on a single consumer-grade device, while outperforming state-of-the-art (SOTA) models on several restoration metrics.

Wenzhong Yan, Dawei Zhao, Ankur Mehta

We propose a computational design tool to enable casual end-users to easily design, fabricate, and assemble flat-pack furniture with guaranteed manufacturability. Using our system, users select parameterized components from a library and constrain their dimensions. Then they abstractly specify connections among components to define the furniture. Once fabrication specifications (e.g. materials) designated, the mechanical implementation of the furniture is automatically handled by leveraging encoded domain expertise. Afterwards, the system outputs 3D models for visualization and mechanical drawings for fabrication. We demonstrate the validity of our approach by designing, fabricating, and assembling a variety of flat-pack (scaled) furniture on demand.

Li Wang, Dawei Zhao, Tao Wu et al.

3D moving object detection is one of the most critical tasks in dynamic scene analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel Drosophila-inspired 3D moving object detection method using Lidar sensors. According to the theory of elementary motion detector, we have developed a motion detector based on the shallow visual neural pathway of Drosophila. This detector is sensitive to the movement of objects and can well suppress background noise. Designing neural circuits with different connection modes, the approach searches for motion areas in a coarse-to-fine fashion and extracts point clouds of each motion area to form moving object proposals. An improved 3D object detection network is then used to estimate the point clouds of each proposal and efficiently generates the 3D bounding boxes and the object categories. We evaluate the proposed approach on the widely-used KITTI benchmark, and state-of-the-art performance was obtained by using the proposed approach on the task of motion detection.

Dawei Zhao, Haipeng Peng, Lixiang Li et al.

Recently, Mun et al. analyzed Wu et al.'s authentication scheme and proposed a enhanced anonymous authentication scheme for roaming service in global mobility networks. However, through careful analysis, we find that Mun et al.'s scheme is vulnerable to impersonation attacks, off-line password guessing attacks and insider attacks, and cannot provide user friendliness, user's anonymity, proper mutual authentication and local verification. To remedy these weaknesses, in this paper we propose a novel anonymous authentication scheme for roaming service in global mobility networks. Security and performance analyses show the proposed scheme is more suitable for the low-power and resource-limited mobile devices, and is secure against various attacks and has many excellent features.

Dawei Zhao, Haipeng Peng, Shudong Li et al.

Recently, Li et al. analyzed Lee et al.'s multi-server authentication scheme and proposed a novel smart card and dynamic ID based remote user authentication scheme for multi-server environments. They claimed that their scheme can resist several kinds of attacks. However, through careful analysis, we find that Li et al.'s scheme is vulnerable to stolen smart card and offline dictionary attack, replay attack, impersonation attack and server spoofing attack. By analyzing other similar schemes, we find that the certain type of dynamic ID based multi-server authentication scheme in which only hash functions are used and no registration center participates in the authentication and session key agreement phase is hard to provide perfect efficient and secure authentication. To compensate for these shortcomings, we improve the recently proposed Liao et al.'s multi-server authentication scheme which is based on pairing and self-certified public keys, and propose a novel dynamic ID based remote user authentication scheme for multi-server environments. Liao et al.'s scheme is found vulnerable to offline dictionary attack and denial of service attack, and cannot provide user's anonymity and local password verification. However, our proposed scheme overcomes the shortcomings of Liao et al.'s scheme. Security and performance analyses show the proposed scheme is secure against various attacks and has many excellent features.

Shangdi Chen, Dawei Zhao

A new construction of authentication codes with arbitration from pseudo-symplectic geometry over finite fields is given. The parameters and the probabilities of deceptions of the codes are also computed.