Wenhao Yao

CV
h-index57
4papers
16citations
Novelty54%
AI Score45

4 Papers

ROApr 4
HAD: Combining Hierarchical Diffusion with Metric-Decoupled RL for End-to-End Driving

Wenhao Yao, Xinglong Sun, Zhenxin Li et al.

End-to-end planning has emerged as a dominant paradigm for autonomous driving, where recent models often adopt a scoring-selection framework to choose trajectories from a large set of candidates, with diffusion-based decoding showing strong promise. However, directly selecting from the entire candidate space remains difficult to optimize, and Gaussian perturbations used in diffusion often introduce unrealistic trajectories that complicate the denoising process. In addition, for training these models, reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise, but existing end-to-end RL approaches typically rely on a single coupled reward without structured signals, limiting optimization effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose HAD, an end-to-end planning framework with a Hierarchical Diffusion Policy that decomposes planning into a coarse-to-fine process. To improve trajectory generation, we introduce Structure-Preserved Trajectory Expansion, which produces realistic candidates while maintaining kinematic structure. For policy learning, we develop Metric-Decoupled Policy Optimization (MDPO) to enable structured RL optimization across multiple driving objectives. Extensive experiments show that HAD achieves new state-of-the-art performance on both NAVSIM and HUGSIM, outperforming prior arts by a huge margin: +2.3 EPDMS on NAVSIM and +4.9 Route Completion on HUGSIM.

ROOct 28, 2025Code
ZTRS: Zero-Imitation End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Trajectory Scoring

Zhenxin Li, Wenhao Yao, Zi Wang et al.

End-to-end autonomous driving maps raw sensor inputs directly into ego-vehicle trajectories to avoid cascading errors from perception modules and to leverage rich semantic cues. Existing frameworks largely rely on Imitation Learning (IL), which can be limited by sub-optimal expert demonstrations and covariate shift during deployment. On the other hand, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has recently shown potential in scaling up with simulations, but is typically confined to low-dimensional symbolic inputs (e.g. 3D objects and maps), falling short of full end-to-end learning from raw sensor data. We introduce ZTRS (Zero-Imitation End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Trajectory Scoring), a framework that combines the strengths of both worlds: sensor inputs without losing information and RL training for robust planning. To the best of our knowledge, ZTRS is the first framework that eliminates IL entirely by only learning from rewards while operating directly on high-dimensional sensor data. ZTRS utilizes offline reinforcement learning with our proposed Exhaustive Policy Optimization (EPO), a variant of policy gradient tailored for enumerable actions and rewards. ZTRS demonstrates strong performance across three benchmarks: Navtest (generic real-world open-loop planning), Navhard (open-loop planning in challenging real-world and synthetic scenarios), and HUGSIM (simulated closed-loop driving). Specifically, ZTRS achieves the state-of-the-art result on Navhard and outperforms IL-based baselines on HUGSIM. Code will be available at https://github.com/woxihuanjiangguo/ZTRS.

CVDec 23, 2024
Comprehensive Multi-Modal Prototypes are Simple and Effective Classifiers for Vast-Vocabulary Object Detection

Yitong Chen, Wenhao Yao, Lingchen Meng et al.

Enabling models to recognize vast open-world categories has been a longstanding pursuit in object detection. By leveraging the generalization capabilities of vision-language models, current open-world detectors can recognize a broader range of vocabularies, despite being trained on limited categories. However, when the scale of the category vocabularies during training expands to a real-world level, previous classifiers aligned with coarse class names significantly reduce the recognition performance of these detectors. In this paper, we introduce Prova, a multi-modal prototype classifier for vast-vocabulary object detection. Prova extracts comprehensive multi-modal prototypes as initialization of alignment classifiers to tackle the vast-vocabulary object recognition failure problem. On V3Det, this simple method greatly enhances the performance among one-stage, two-stage, and DETR-based detectors with only additional projection layers in both supervised and open-vocabulary settings. In particular, Prova improves Faster R-CNN, FCOS, and DINO by 3.3, 6.2, and 2.9 AP respectively in the supervised setting of V3Det. For the open-vocabulary setting, Prova achieves a new state-of-the-art performance with 32.8 base AP and 11.0 novel AP, which is of 2.6 and 4.3 gain over the previous methods.

CVJun 17, 2024
V3Det Challenge 2024 on Vast Vocabulary and Open Vocabulary Object Detection: Methods and Results

Jiaqi Wang, Yuhang Zang, Pan Zhang et al.

Detecting objects in real-world scenes is a complex task due to various challenges, including the vast range of object categories, and potential encounters with previously unknown or unseen objects. The challenges necessitate the development of public benchmarks and challenges to advance the field of object detection. Inspired by the success of previous COCO and LVIS Challenges, we organize the V3Det Challenge 2024 in conjunction with the 4th Open World Vision Workshop: Visual Perception via Learning in an Open World (VPLOW) at CVPR 2024, Seattle, US. This challenge aims to push the boundaries of object detection research and encourage innovation in this field. The V3Det Challenge 2024 consists of two tracks: 1) Vast Vocabulary Object Detection: This track focuses on detecting objects from a large set of 13204 categories, testing the detection algorithm's ability to recognize and locate diverse objects. 2) Open Vocabulary Object Detection: This track goes a step further, requiring algorithms to detect objects from an open set of categories, including unknown objects. In the following sections, we will provide a comprehensive summary and analysis of the solutions submitted by participants. By analyzing the methods and solutions presented, we aim to inspire future research directions in vast vocabulary and open-vocabulary object detection, driving progress in this field. Challenge homepage: https://v3det.openxlab.org.cn/challenge