Shi Meng

Jun Fu, Bin Tian, Haonan Chen et al.

Autonomous parking plays a vital role in intelligent vehicle systems, particularly in constrained urban environments where high-precision control is required. While traditional rule-based parking systems struggle with environmental uncertainties and lack adaptability in crowded or dynamic scenes, human drivers demonstrate the ability to park intuitively without explicit modeling. Inspired by this observation, we propose a Transformer-based end-to-end framework for autonomous parking that learns from expert demonstrations. The network takes as input surround-view camera images, goal-point representations, ego vehicle motion, and pedestrian trajectories. It outputs discrete control sequences including throttle, braking, steering, and gear selection. A novel cross-attention module integrates BEV features with target points, and a GRU-based pedestrian predictor enhances safety by modeling dynamic obstacles. We validate our method on the CARLA 0.9.14 simulator in both vertical and parallel parking scenarios. Experiments show our model achieves a high success rate of 96.57\%, with average positional and orientation errors of 0.21 meters and 0.41 degrees, respectively. The ablation studies further demonstrate the effectiveness of key modules such as pedestrian prediction and goal-point attention fusion. The code and dataset will be released at: https://github.com/little-snail-f/ParkFormer.

Hao Shi, Yifan Zhou, Kailun Yang et al.

Optical flow estimation is a basic task in self-driving and robotics systems, which enables to temporally interpret traffic scenes. Autonomous vehicles clearly benefit from the ultra-wide Field of View (FoV) offered by 360° panoramic sensors. However, due to the unique imaging process of panoramic cameras, models designed for pinhole images do not directly generalize satisfactorily to 360° panoramic images. In this paper, we put forward a novel network framework--PanoFlow, to learn optical flow for panoramic images. To overcome the distortions introduced by equirectangular projection in panoramic transformation, we design a Flow Distortion Augmentation (FDA) method, which contains radial flow distortion (FDA-R) or equirectangular flow distortion (FDA-E). We further look into the definition and properties of cyclic optical flow for panoramic videos, and hereby propose a Cyclic Flow Estimation (CFE) method by leveraging the cyclicity of spherical images to infer 360° optical flow and converting large displacement to relatively small displacement. PanoFlow is applicable to any existing flow estimation method and benefits from the progress of narrow-FoV flow estimation. In addition, we create and release a synthetic panoramic dataset FlowScape based on CARLA to facilitate training and quantitative analysis. PanoFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance on the public OmniFlowNet and the established FlowScape benchmarks. Our proposed approach reduces the End-Point-Error (EPE) on FlowScape by 27.3%. On OmniFlowNet, PanoFlow achieves a 55.5% error reduction from the best published result. We also qualitatively validate our method via a collection vehicle and a public real-world OmniPhotos dataset, indicating strong potential and robustness for real-world navigation applications. Code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/MasterHow/PanoFlow.

Shi Meng, Bin Tian, Xiaotong Zhang

Efficient truck dispatching via Reinforcement Learning (RL) in open-pit mining is often hindered by reliance on complex reward engineering and value-based methods. This paper introduces Curriculum-inspired Adaptive Direct Policy Guidance, a novel curriculum learning strategy for policy-based RL to address these issues. We adapt Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) for mine dispatching's uneven decision intervals using time deltas in Temporal Difference and Generalized Advantage Estimation, and employ a Shortest Processing Time teacher policy for guided exploration via policy regularization and adaptive guidance. Evaluations in OpenMines demonstrate our approach yields a 10% performance gain and faster convergence over standard PPO across sparse and dense reward settings, showcasing improved robustness to reward design. This direct policy guidance method provides a general and effective curriculum learning technique for RL-based truck dispatching, enabling future work on advanced architectures.