Reeshad Khan

Reeshad Khan, John Gauch

Robust perception underpins autonomous driving, and most recent progress comes from scaling the model-larger backbones, foundation models, and cooperative multi-agent fusion. We pursue a complementary, upstream question: what should the camera itself measure? Using a differentiable RAW-to-task pipeline, we decompose which sensor degrees of freedom benefit dense prediction. Learning the spectral colour-filter-array (CFA) weights is the dominant lever, improving mIoU by +0.017 (KITTI-360) and +0.023 (ACDC) over a fixed camera. In contrast, point-spread-function (optics) co-design is net-negative (-0.020 mIoU on KITTI-360) - a consequence of the data-processing inequality, which also bounds the task information that any downstream model, however large or cooperative, can recover. Noise co-optimisation is marginal, and counter to intuition enlarging the CFA tile beyond 2x2 consistently hurts, as the filters are confined to the rank three sRGB input. Because the intervention is at the sensor, the gains are model-agnostic; we validate robustness on ACDC's fog, night, rain, and snow, and conclude with a simple recipe: learn the 2x2 CFA weights and keep an identity PSF.

Reeshad Khan, John Gauch

We present TinyBEV, a unified, camera only Bird's Eye View (BEV) framework that distills the full-stack capabilities of a large planning-oriented teacher (UniAD [19]) into a compact, real-time student model. Unlike prior efficient camera only baselines such as VAD[23] and VADv2[7], TinyBEV supports the complete autonomy stack 3D detection, HD-map segmentation, motion forecasting, occupancy prediction, and goal-directed planning within a streamlined 28M-parameter backbone, achieving a 78% reduction in parameters over UniAD [19]. Our model-agnostic, multi-stage distillation strategy combines feature-level, output-level, and adaptive region-aware supervision to effectively transfer high-capacity multi-modal knowledge to a lightweight BEV representation. On nuScenes[4], Tiny-BEV achieves 39.0 mAP for detection, 1.08 minADE for motion forecasting, and a 0.32 collision rate, while running 5x faster (11 FPS) and requiring only camera input. These results demonstrate that full-stack driving intelligence can be retained in resource-constrained settings, bridging the gap between large-scale, multi-modal perception-planning models and deployment-ready real-time autonomy.