Raehyuk Jung

Seungjun Yu, Seonho Lee, Namho Kim et al.

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong understanding of driving scenes, drawing interest in their application to autonomous driving. However, high-level reasoning in safety-critical scenarios, where avoiding one traffic risk can create another, remains a major challenge. Such reasoning is often infeasible with only a single front view and requires a comprehensive view of the environment, which we achieve through multi-view inputs. We define Safety-Critical Reasoning as a new task that leverages multi-view inputs to address this challenge. Then, we distill Safety-Critical Reasoning into two stages: first resolve the immediate risk, then mitigate the decision-induced downstream risks. To support this, we introduce WaymoQA, a dataset of 35,000 human-annotated question-answer pairs covering complex, high-risk driving scenarios. The dataset includes multiple-choice and open-ended formats across both image and video modalities. Experiments reveal that existing MLLMs underperform in safety-critical scenarios compared to normal scenes, but fine-tuning with WaymoQA significantly improves their reasoning ability, highlighting the effectiveness of our dataset in developing safer and more reasoning-capable driving agents. Our code and data are provided in https://github.com/sjyu001/WaymoQA

Raehyuk Jung, Seungjun Yu, Hyunjung Shim

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) combine a vision encoder and a large language model (LLM) through alignment training, showing strong performance on multimodal tasks. A central component in this architecture is the projection layer, which maps visual features into the LLM's embedding space. Despite its importance, its ability to generalize to unseen visual concepts has not been systematically evaluated. To address this, we propose a benchmark for evaluating projection-layer generalization. We adapt object detection datasets (rich in fine-grained annotations) into a prompting format and design train/test splits with disjoint label sets, enabling precise control over seen and unseen concept separation. Experimental results show that the projection layer retains about 79 to 88 percent of the performance on unseen classes compared to seen ones across various settings, suggesting a non-trivial level of generalization even without explicit alignment supervision on those concepts. We further analyze this behavior through a mechanistic interpretability lens. Our findings indicate that the feed-forward network in the projection layer functions like a key-value memory, processing seen and unseen tokens in similar ways. This study introduces a new evaluation framework for alignment generalization and highlights the potential for efficient VLM training with limited aligned data.

Raehyuk Jung, Sungmin Cho, Junseok Kwon

We present a novel method for the upright adjustment of 360 images. Our network consists of two modules, which are a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a graph convolutional network (GCN). The input 360 images is processed with the CNN for visual feature extraction, and the extracted feature map is converted into a graph that finds a spherical representation of the input. We also introduce a novel loss function to address the issue of discrete probability distributions defined on the surface of a sphere. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms fully connected based methods.

Sungmin Cho, Raehyuk Jung, Junseok Kwon

Using convolutional neural networks for 360images can induce sub-optimal performance due to distortions entailed by a planar projection. The distortion gets deteriorated when a rotation is applied to the 360image. Thus, many researches based on convolutions attempt to reduce the distortions to learn accurate representation. In contrast, we leverage the transformer architecture to solve image classification problems for 360images. Using the proposed transformer for 360images has two advantages. First, our method does not require the erroneous planar projection process by sampling pixels from the sphere surface. Second, our sampling method based on regular polyhedrons makes low rotation equivariance errors, because specific rotations can be reduced to permutations of faces. In experiments, we validate our network on two aspects, as follows. First, we show that using a transformer with highly uniform sampling methods can help reduce the distortion. Second, we demonstrate that the transformer architecture can achieve rotation equivariance on specific rotations. We compare our method to other state-of-the-art algorithms using the SPH-MNIST, SPH-CIFAR, and SUN360 datasets and show that our method is competitive with other methods.