Yang Xing

Long Chen, Yuchen Li, Chao Huang et al.

Interest in autonomous driving (AD) and intelligent vehicles (IVs) is growing at a rapid pace due to the convenience, safety, and economic benefits. Although a number of surveys have reviewed research achievements in this field, they are still limited in specific tasks, lack of systematic summary and research directions in the future. Here we propose a Survey of Surveys (SoS) for total technologies of AD and IVs that reviews the history, summarizes the milestones, and provides the perspectives, ethics, and future research directions. To our knowledge, this article is the first SoS with milestones in AD and IVs, which constitutes our complete research work together with two other technical surveys. We anticipate that this article will bring novel and diverse insights to researchers and abecedarians, and serve as a bridge between past and future.

İrem Üstek, Jay Desai, Iván López Torrecillas et al.

This study introduces an innovative violence detection framework tailored to the unique requirements of smart airports, where prompt responses to violent situations are crucial. The proposed framework harnesses the power of ViTPose for human pose estimation. It employs a CNN - BiLSTM network to analyse spatial and temporal information within keypoints sequences, enabling the accurate classification of violent behaviour in real time. Seamlessly integrated within the SAFE (Situational Awareness for Enhanced Security framework of SAAB, the solution underwent integrated testing to ensure robust performance in real world scenarios. The AIRTLab dataset, characterized by its high video quality and relevance to surveillance scenarios, is utilized in this study to enhance the model's accuracy and mitigate false positives. As airports face increased foot traffic in the post pandemic era, implementing AI driven violence detection systems, such as the one proposed, is paramount for improving security, expediting response times, and promoting data informed decision making. The implementation of this framework not only diminishes the probability of violent events but also assists surveillance teams in effectively addressing potential threats, ultimately fostering a more secure and protected aviation sector. Codes are available at: https://github.com/Asami-1/GDP.

Renjie Liang, Yiling Ma, Yang Xing et al.

Automated radiology report generation from 3D CT volumes often suffers from incomplete pathology coverage. We provide empirical evidence that this limitation stems from a representational bottleneck: contrastive 3D CT embeddings encode discriminative pathology signals, yet exhibit severe dimensional concentration, with as few as 2 effective dimensions out of 512. Corroborating this, scaling the language model yields no measurable improvement, suggesting that the bottleneck lies in the visual representation rather than the generator. This bottleneck limits both generation and retrieval; naive static retrieval fails to improve clinical efficacy and can even degrade performance. We propose \textbf{AdaRAG-CT}, an adaptive augmentation framework that compensates for this visual bottleneck by introducing supplementary textual information through controlled retrieval and selectively integrating it during generation. On the CT-RATE benchmark, AdaRAG-CT achieves state-of-the-art clinical efficacy, improving Clinical F1 from 0.420 (CT-Agent) to 0.480 (+6 points); ablation studies confirm that both the retrieval and generation components contribute to the improvement. Code is available at https://github.com/renjie-liang/Adaptive-RAG-for-3DCT-Report-Generation.

Karan Kheta, Claire Delgove, Ruolin Liu et al.

Future airports are becoming more complex and congested with the increasing number of travellers. While the airports are more likely to become hotspots for potential conflicts to break out which can cause serious delays to flights and several safety issues. An intelligent algorithm which renders security surveillance more effective in detecting conflicts would bring many benefits to the passengers in terms of their safety, finance, and travelling efficiency. This paper details the development of a machine learning model to classify conflicting behaviour in a crowd. HRNet is used to segment the images and then two approaches are taken to classify the poses of people in the frame via multiple classifiers. Among them, it was found that the support vector machine (SVM) achieved the most performant achieving precision of 94.37%. Where the model falls short is against ambiguous behaviour such as a hug or losing track of a subject in the frame. The resulting model has potential for deployment within an airport if improvements are made to cope with the vast number of potential passengers in view as well as training against further ambiguous behaviours which will arise in an airport setting. In turn, will provide the capability to enhance security surveillance and improve airport safety.

Yang Xing, Jiong Wu, Yuheng Bu et al.

Although new vision foundation models such as Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) have significantly enhanced zero-shot image segmentation capabilities, reliance on human-provided prompts poses significant challenges in adapting SAM2 to medical image segmentation tasks. Moreover, SAM2's performance in medical image segmentation was limited by the domain shift issue, since it was originally trained on natural images and videos. To address these challenges, we proposed SAM2 with support-set guided prompting (SAM2-SGP), a framework that eliminated the need for manual prompts. The proposed model leveraged the memory mechanism of SAM2 to generate pseudo-masks using image-mask pairs from a support set via a Pseudo-mask Generation (PMG) module. We further introduced a novel Pseudo-mask Attention (PMA) module, which used these pseudo-masks to automatically generate bounding boxes and enhance localized feature extraction by guiding attention to relevant areas. Furthermore, a low-rank adaptation (LoRA) strategy was adopted to mitigate the domain shift issue. The proposed framework was evaluated on both 2D and 3D datasets across multiple medical imaging modalities, including fundus photography, X-ray, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and ultrasound. The results demonstrated a significant performance improvement over state-of-the-art models, such as nnUNet and SwinUNet, as well as foundation models, such as SAM2 and MedSAM2, underscoring the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/astlian9/SAM_Support.

Jiong Wu, Yang Xing, Boxiao Yu et al.

Most publicly available medical segmentation datasets are only partially labeled, with annotations provided for a subset of anatomical structures. When multiple datasets are combined for training, this incomplete annotation poses challenges, as it limits the model's ability to learn shared anatomical representations among datasets. Furthermore, vision-only frameworks often fail to capture complex anatomical relationships and task-specific distinctions, leading to reduced segmentation accuracy and poor generalizability to unseen datasets. In this study, we proposed a novel CLIP-DINO Prompt-Driven Segmentation Network (CDPDNet), which combined a self-supervised vision transformer with CLIP-based text embedding and introduced task-specific text prompts to tackle these challenges. Specifically, the framework was constructed upon a convolutional neural network (CNN) and incorporated DINOv2 to extract both fine-grained and global visual features, which were then fused using a multi-head cross-attention module to overcome the limited long-range modeling capability of CNNs. In addition, CLIP-derived text embeddings were projected into the visual space to help model complex relationships among organs and tumors. To further address the partial label challenge and enhance inter-task discriminative capability, a Text-based Task Prompt Generation (TTPG) module that generated task-specific prompts was designed to guide the segmentation. Extensive experiments on multiple medical imaging datasets demonstrated that CDPDNet consistently outperformed existing state-of-the-art segmentation methods. Code and pretrained model are available at: https://github.com/wujiong-hub/CDPDNet.git.

Xiangqi Kong, Yang Xing, Antonios Tsourdos et al.

Nowadays, large-scale foundation models are being increasingly integrated into numerous safety-critical applications, including human-autonomy teaming (HAT) within transportation, medical, and defence domains. Consequently, the inherent 'black-box' nature of these sophisticated deep neural networks heightens the significance of fostering mutual understanding and trust between humans and autonomous systems. To tackle the transparency challenges in HAT, this paper conducts a thoughtful study on the underexplored domain of Explainable Interface (EI) in HAT systems from a human-centric perspective, thereby enriching the existing body of research in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). We explore the design, development, and evaluation of EI within XAI-enhanced HAT systems. To do so, we first clarify the distinctions between these concepts: EI, explanations and model explainability, aiming to provide researchers and practitioners with a structured understanding. Second, we contribute to a novel framework for EI, addressing the unique challenges in HAT. Last, our summarized evaluation framework for ongoing EI offers a holistic perspective, encompassing model performance, human-centered factors, and group task objectives. Based on extensive surveys across XAI, HAT, psychology, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), this review offers multiple novel insights into incorporating XAI into HAT systems and outlines future directions.

Noe Claudel, Weisi Guo, Yang Xing

Facial identification systems are increasingly deployed in surveillance and yet their vulnerability to adversarial evasion and impersonation attacks pose a critical risk. This paper introduces a novel framework for generating adversarial patches capable of both evasion and impersonation attacks against deep re-identification models across non-overlapping cameras. Unlike prior approaches that require iterative patch optimisation for each target, our method employs a conditional encoder-decoder network to synthesize adversarial patches in a single forward pass, guided by multi-scale features from source and target images. The patches are optimised with a dual adversarial objective comprising of pull and push terms. To enhance imperceptibility and aid physical deployment, we further integrate naturalistic patch generation using pre-trained latent diffusion models. Experiments on standard pedestrian (Market-1501, DukeMTMCreID) and facial recognition benchmarks (CelebA-HQ, PubFig) datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our adversarial evasion attacks reduce mean Average Precision from 90% to 0.4% in white-box settings and from 72% to 0.4% in black-box settings, showing strong cross-model generalization. In targeted impersonation attacks, our framework achieves a success rate of 27% on CelebA-HQ, competing with other patch-based methods. We go further to use clustering of activation maps to interpret which features are most used by adversarial attacks and propose a pathway for future countermeasures. The results highlight the practicality of adversarial patch attacks on retrieval-based systems and underline the urgent need for robust defense strategies.

Pengrui Quan, Xiaomin Ouyang, Jeya Vikranth Jeyakumar et al.

Effective processing, interpretation, and management of sensor data have emerged as a critical component of cyber-physical systems. Traditionally, processing sensor data requires profound theoretical knowledge and proficiency in signal-processing tools. However, recent works show that Large Language Models (LLMs) have promising capabilities in processing sensory data, suggesting their potential as copilots for developing sensing systems. To explore this potential, we construct a comprehensive benchmark, SensorBench, to establish a quantifiable objective. The benchmark incorporates diverse real-world sensor datasets for various tasks. The results show that while LLMs exhibit considerable proficiency in simpler tasks, they face inherent challenges in processing compositional tasks with parameter selections compared to engineering experts. Additionally, we investigate four prompting strategies for sensor processing and show that self-verification can outperform all other baselines in 48% of tasks. Our study provides a comprehensive benchmark and prompting analysis for future developments, paving the way toward an LLM-based sensor processing copilot.

Yang Xing, Jiong Wu, Savas Ozdemir et al.

Recent progress in medical vision-language models (VLMs) has achieved strong performance on image-level text-centric tasks such as report generation and visual question answering (VQA). However, achieving fine-grained visual grounding and volumetric spatial reasoning in 3D medical VLMs remains challenging, particularly when aiming to unify these capabilities within a single, generalizable framework. To address this challenge, we proposed MedVL-SAM2, a unified 3D medical multimodal model that concurrently supports report generation, VQA, and multi-paradigm segmentation, including semantic, referring, and interactive segmentation. MedVL-SAM2 integrates image-level reasoning and pixel-level perception through a cohesive architecture tailored for 3D medical imaging, and incorporates a SAM2-based volumetric segmentation module to enable precise multi-granular spatial reasoning. The model is trained in a multi-stage pipeline: it is first pre-trained on a large-scale corpus of 3D CT image-text pairs to align volumetric visual features with radiology-language embeddings. It is then jointly optimized with both language-understanding and segmentation objectives using a comprehensive 3D CT segmentation dataset. This joint training enables flexible interaction via language, point, or box prompts, thereby unifying high-level visual reasoning with spatially precise localization. Our unified architecture delivers state-of-the-art performance across report generation, VQA, and multiple 3D segmentation tasks. Extensive analyses further show that the model provides reliable 3D visual grounding, controllable interactive segmentation, and robust cross-modal reasoning, demonstrating that high-level semantic reasoning and precise 3D localization can be jointly achieved within a unified 3D medical VLM.

Long Chen, Yuchen Li, Chao Huang et al.

Interest in autonomous driving (AD) and intelligent vehicles (IVs) is growing at a rapid pace due to the convenience, safety, and economic benefits. Although a number of surveys have reviewed research achievements in this field, they are still limited in specific tasks and lack systematic summaries and research directions in the future. Our work is divided into 3 independent articles and the first part is a Survey of Surveys (SoS) for total technologies of AD and IVs that involves the history, summarizes the milestones, and provides the perspectives, ethics, and future research directions. This is the second part (Part I for this technical survey) to review the development of control, computing system design, communication, High Definition map (HD map), testing, and human behaviors in IVs. In addition, the third part (Part II for this technical survey) is to review the perception and planning sections. The objective of this paper is to involve all the sections of AD, summarize the latest technical milestones, and guide abecedarians to quickly understand the development of AD and IVs. Combining the SoS and Part II, we anticipate that this work will bring novel and diverse insights to researchers and abecedarians, and serve as a bridge between past and future.

Xiaoyu Mo, Yang Xing, Chen Lv

Integrating trajectory prediction to the decision-making and planning modules of modular autonomous driving systems is expected to improve the safety and efficiency of self-driving vehicles. However, a vehicle's future trajectory prediction is a challenging task since it is affected by the social interactive behaviors of neighboring vehicles, and the number of neighboring vehicles can vary in different situations. This work proposes a GNN-RNN based Encoder-Decoder network for interaction-aware trajectory prediction, where vehicles' dynamics features are extracted from their historical tracks using RNN, and the inter-vehicular interaction is represented by a directed graph and encoded using a GNN. The parallelism of GNN implies the proposed method's potential to predict multi-vehicular trajectories simultaneously. Evaluation on the dataset extracted from the NGSIM US-101 dataset shows that the proposed model is able to predict a target vehicle's trajectory in situations with a variable number of surrounding vehicles.

Xiaoyu Mo, Yang Xing, Chen Lv

Simultaneous trajectory prediction for multiple heterogeneous traffic participants is essential for the safe and efficient operation of connected automated vehicles under complex driving situations in the real world. The multi-agent prediction task is challenging, as the motions of traffic participants are affected by many factors, including their individual dynamics, their interactions with surrounding agents, the traffic infrastructures, and the number and modalities of the target agents. To further advance the trajectory prediction techniques, in this work we propose a three-channel framework together with a novel Heterogeneous Edge-enhanced graph ATtention network (HEAT), which is able to deal with the heterogeneity of the target agents and traffic participants involved. Specifically, the agent's dynamics are extracted from their historical states using type-specific encoders. The inter-agent interactions are represented with a directed edge-featured heterogeneous graph, and then interaction features are extracted using the proposed HEAT network. Besides, the map features are shared across all agents by introducing a selective gate mechanism. And finally, the trajectories of multi-agent are executed simultaneously. Validations using both urban and highway driving datasets show that the proposed model can realize simultaneous trajectory predictions for multiple agents under complex traffic situations, and achieve state-of-the-art performance with respect to prediction accuracy, demonstrating its feasibility and effectiveness.

Jingda Wu, Zhiyu Huang, Chao Huang et al.

Due to the limited smartness and abilities of machine intelligence, currently autonomous vehicles are still unable to handle all kinds of situations and completely replace drivers. Because humans exhibit strong robustness and adaptability in complex driving scenarios, it is of great importance to introduce humans into the training loop of artificial intelligence, leveraging human intelligence to further advance machine learning algorithms. In this study, a real-time human-guidance-based deep reinforcement learning (Hug-DRL) method is developed for policy training of autonomous driving. Leveraging a newly designed control transfer mechanism between human and automation, human is able to intervene and correct the agent's unreasonable actions in real time when necessary during the model training process. Based on this human-in-the-loop guidance mechanism, an improved actor-critic architecture with modified policy and value networks is developed. The fast convergence of the proposed Hug-DRL allows real-time human guidance actions to be fused into the agent's training loop, further improving the efficiency and performance of deep reinforcement learning. The developed method is validated by human-in-the-loop experiments with 40 subjects and compared with other state-of-the-art learning approaches. The results suggest that the proposed method can effectively enhance the training efficiency and performance of the deep reinforcement learning algorithm under human guidance, without imposing specific requirements on participant expertise and experience.

Xiaoyu Mo, Yang Xing, Chen Lv

Predicting the future trajectory of surrounding vehicles is essential for the navigation of autonomous vehicles in complex real-world driving scenarios. It is challenging as a vehicle's motion is affected by many factors, including its surrounding infrastructures and vehicles. In this work, we develop the ReCoG (Recurrent Convolutional and Graph Neural Networks), which is a general scheme that represents vehicle interactions with infrastructure information as a heterogeneous graph and applies graph neural networks (GNNs) to model the high-level interactions for trajectory prediction. Nodes in the graph contain corresponding features, where a vehicle node contains its sequential feature encoded using Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and an infrastructure node contains spatial feature encoded using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Then the ReCoG predicts the future trajectory of the target vehicle by jointly considering all of the features. Experiments are conducted by using the INTERACTION dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed ReCoG outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of different types of displacement error, validating the feasibility and effectiveness of the developed approach.

Teng Liu, Yang Xing, Long Chen et al.

Parallel driving is a novel framework to synthesize vehicle intelligence and transport automation. This article aims to define digital quadruplets in parallel driving. In the cyber-physical-social systems (CPSS), based on the ACP method, the names of the digital quadruplets are first given, which are descriptive, predictive, prescriptive and real vehicles. The objectives of the three virtual digital vehicles are interacting, guiding, simulating and improving with the real vehicles. Then, the three virtual components of the digital quadruplets are introduced in detail and their applications are also illustrated. Finally, the real vehicles in the parallel driving system and the research process of the digital quadruplets are depicted. The presented digital quadruplets in parallel driving are expected to make the future connected automated driving safety, efficiently and synergistically.

Xiaoyu Mo, Yang Xing, Chen Lv

Predicting the future trajectory of a surrounding vehicle in congested traffic is one of the basic abilities of an autonomous vehicle. In congestion, a vehicle's future movement is the result of its interaction with surrounding vehicles. A vehicle in congestion may have many neighbors in a relatively short distance, while only a small part of neighbors affect its future trajectory mostly. In this work, An interaction-aware method which predicts the future trajectory of an ego vehicle considering its interaction with eight surrounding vehicles is proposed. The dynamics of vehicles are encoded by LSTMs with shared weights, and the interaction is extracted with a simple CNN. The proposed model is trained and tested on trajectories extracted from the publicly accessible NGSIM US-101 dataset. Quantitative experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms previous models in terms of root-mean-square error (RMSE). Results visualization shows that the model is able to predict future trajectory induced by lane change before the vehicle operate obvious lateral movement to initiate lane changing.

Zhongxu Hu, Yang Xing, Chen Lv et al.

Head pose estimation is a crucial problem for many tasks, such as driver attention, fatigue detection, and human behaviour analysis. It is well known that neural networks are better at handling classification problems than regression problems. It is an extremely nonlinear process to let the network output the angle value directly for optimization learning, and the weight constraint of the loss function will be relatively weak. This paper proposes a novel Bernoulli heatmap for head pose estimation from a single RGB image. Our method can achieve the positioning of the head area while estimating the angles of the head. The Bernoulli heatmap makes it possible to construct fully convolutional neural networks without fully connected layers and provides a new idea for the output form of head pose estimation. A deep convolutional neural network (CNN) structure with multiscale representations is adopted to maintain high-resolution information and low-resolution information in parallel. This kind of structure can maintain rich, high-resolution representations. In addition, channelwise fusion is adopted to make the fusion weights learnable instead of simple addition with equal weights. As a result, the estimation is spatially more precise and potentially more accurate. The effectiveness of the proposed method is empirically demonstrated by comparing it with other state-of-the-art methods on public datasets.

Peng Hang, Chen Lv, Yang Xing et al.

Considering that human-driven vehicles and autonomous vehicles (AVs) will coexist on roads in the future for a long time, how to merge AVs into human drivers traffic ecology and minimize the effect of AVs and their misfit with human drivers, are issues worthy of consideration. Moreover, different passengers have different needs for AVs, thus, how to provide personalized choices for different passengers is another issue for AVs. Therefore, a human-like decision making framework is designed for AVs in this paper. Different driving styles and social interaction characteristics are formulated for AVs regarding driving safety, ride comfort and travel efficiency, which are considered in the modeling process of decision making. Then, Nash equilibrium and Stackelberg game theory are applied to the noncooperative decision making. In addition, potential field method and model predictive control (MPC) are combined to deal with the motion prediction and planning for AVs, which provides predicted motion information for the decision-making module. Finally, two typical testing scenarios of lane change, i.e., merging and overtaking, are carried out to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed decision-making framework considering different human-like behaviors. Testing results indicate that both the two game theoretic approaches can provide reasonable human-like decision making for AVs. Compared with the Nash equilibrium approach, under the normal driving style, the cost value of decision making using the Stackelberg game theoretic approach is reduced by over 20%.

Peng Hang, Chen Lv, Chao Huang et al.

This paper presents a novel integrated approach to deal with the decision making and motion planning for lane-change maneuvers of autonomous vehicle (AV) considering social behaviors of surrounding traffic occupants. Reflected by driving styles and intentions of surrounding vehicles, the social behaviors are taken into consideration during the modelling process. Then, the Stackelberg Game theory is applied to solve the decision-making, which is formulated as a non-cooperative game problem. Besides, potential field is adopted in the motion planning model, which uses different potential functions to describe surrounding vehicles with different behaviors and road constrains. Then, Model Predictive Control (MPC) is utilized to predict the state and trajectory of the autonomous vehicle. Finally, the decision-making and motion planning is then integrated into a constrained multi-objective optimization problem. Three testing scenarios considering different social behaviors of surrounding vehicles are carried out to validate the performance of the proposed approach. Testing results show that the integrated approach is able to address different social interactions with other traffic participants, and make proper and safe decisions and planning for autonomous vehicles, demonstrating its feasibility and effectiveness.

Zhiyu Huang, Chen Lv, Yang Xing et al.

This study aims to improve the performance and generalization capability of end-to-end autonomous driving with scene understanding leveraging deep learning and multimodal sensor fusion techniques. The designed end-to-end deep neural network takes as input the visual image and associated depth information in an early fusion level and outputs the pixel-wise semantic segmentation as scene understanding and vehicle control commands concurrently. The end-to-end deep learning-based autonomous driving model is tested in high-fidelity simulated urban driving conditions and compared with the benchmark of CoRL2017 and NoCrash. The testing results show that the proposed approach is of better performance and generalization ability, achieving a 100% success rate in static navigation tasks in both training and unobserved situations, as well as better success rates in other tasks than the prior models. A further ablation study shows that the model with the removal of multimodal sensor fusion or scene understanding pales in the new environment because of the false perception. The results verify that the performance of our model is improved by the synergy of multimodal sensor fusion with scene understanding subtask, demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of the developed deep neural network with multimodal sensor fusion.