Erkang Cheng

Qichang Zhang, Hailong Wang, Baiang Li et al.

Real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) requires balancing structural fidelity to degraded observations with realistic detail synthesis. However, existing generative Real-ISR methods often rely on entangled conditioning mechanisms, leading to structural drift or semantically inconsistent details. To address this issue, we propose Visual In-Context Restoration (VICR), a Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based framework that formulates Real-ISR as image completion. Specifically, we introduce a decoupled visual prior injection mechanism that derives local and global cues from the low-quality (LQ) image: local cues help recover image structures and support high-frequency detail synthesis, while global cues guide overall generation and promote semantic consistency. For ambiguous regions under severe degradation, VICR employs an inference-time agent to refine semantic prompts using visual evidence from the LQ input while keeping model parameters fixed. Experiments show that VICR achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple Real-ISR benchmarks with only 127M trainable parameters.

Hengxu Zhang, Pengpeng Liang, Zhiyong Sun et al.

Both CNN-based and Transformer-based object detection with bounding box representation have been extensively studied in computer vision and medical image analysis, but circular object detection in medical images is still underexplored. Inspired by the recent anchor free CNN-based circular object detection method (CircleNet) for ball-shape glomeruli detection in renal pathology, in this paper, we present CircleFormer, a Transformer-based circular medical object detection with dynamic anchor circles. Specifically, queries with circle representation in Transformer decoder iteratively refine the circular object detection results, and a circle cross attention module is introduced to compute the similarity between circular queries and image features. A generalized circle IoU (gCIoU) is proposed to serve as a new regression loss of circular object detection as well. Moreover, our approach is easy to generalize to the segmentation task by adding a simple segmentation branch to CircleFormer. We evaluate our method in circular nuclei detection and segmentation on the public MoNuSeg dataset, and the experimental results show that our method achieves promising performance compared with the state-of-the-art approaches. The effectiveness of each component is validated via ablation studies as well. Our code is released at https://github.com/zhanghx-iim-ahu/CircleFormer.

Yongle Luo, Yuxin Wang, Kun Dong et al.

Exploration with sparse rewards remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Especially for sequential object manipulation tasks, the RL agent always receives negative rewards until completing all sub-tasks, which results in low exploration efficiency. To solve these tasks efficiently, we propose a novel self-guided continual RL framework, RelayHER (RHER). RHER first decomposes a sequential task into new sub-tasks with increasing complexity and ensures that the simplest sub-task can be learned quickly by utilizing Hindsight Experience Replay (HER). Secondly, we design a multi-goal & multi-task network to learn these sub-tasks simultaneously. Finally, we propose a Self-Guided Exploration Strategy (SGES). With SGES, the learned sub-task policy will guide the agent to the states that are helpful to learn more complex sub-task with HER. By this self-guided exploration and relay policy learning, RHER can solve these sequential tasks efficiently stage by stage. The experimental results show that RHER significantly outperforms vanilla-HER in sample-efficiency on five singleobject and five complex multi-object manipulation tasks (e.g., Push, Insert, ObstaclePush, Stack, TStack, etc.). The proposed RHER has also been applied to learn a contact-rich push task on a physical robot from scratch, and the success rate reached 10/10 with only 250 episodes.

Lang Peng, Zhirong Chen, Zhangjie Fu et al.

Semantic segmentation in bird's eye view (BEV) is an important task for autonomous driving. Though this task has attracted a large amount of research efforts, it is still challenging to flexibly cope with arbitrary (single or multiple) camera sensors equipped on the autonomous vehicle. In this paper, we present BEVSegFormer, an effective transformer-based method for BEV semantic segmentation from arbitrary camera rigs. Specifically, our method first encodes image features from arbitrary cameras with a shared backbone. These image features are then enhanced by a deformable transformer-based encoder. Moreover, we introduce a BEV transformer decoder module to parse BEV semantic segmentation results. An efficient multi-camera deformable attention unit is designed to carry out the BEV-to-image view transformation. Finally, the queries are reshaped according the layout of grids in the BEV, and upsampled to produce the semantic segmentation result in a supervised manner. We evaluate the proposed algorithm on the public nuScenes dataset and a self-collected dataset. Experimental results show that our method achieves promising performance on BEV semantic segmentation from arbitrary camera rigs. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of each component via ablation study.

Yifeng Bai, Zhirong Chen, Zhangjie Fu et al.

3D lane detection is an integral part of autonomous driving systems. Previous CNN and Transformer-based methods usually first generate a bird's-eye-view (BEV) feature map from the front view image, and then use a sub-network with BEV feature map as input to predict 3D lanes. Such approaches require an explicit view transformation between BEV and front view, which itself is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose CurveFormer, a single-stage Transformer-based method that directly calculates 3D lane parameters and can circumvent the difficult view transformation step. Specifically, we formulate 3D lane detection as a curve propagation problem by using curve queries. A 3D lane query is represented by a dynamic and ordered anchor point set. In this way, queries with curve representation in Transformer decoder iteratively refine the 3D lane detection results. Moreover, a curve cross-attention module is introduced to compute the similarities between curve queries and image features. Additionally, a context sampling module that can capture more relative image features of a curve query is provided to further boost the 3D lane detection performance. We evaluate our method for 3D lane detection on both synthetic and real-world datasets, and the experimental results show that our method achieves promising performance compared with the state-of-the-art approaches. The effectiveness of each component is validated via ablation studies as well.

Naifan Li, Fan Song, Ying Zhang et al.

Detection of rare objects (e.g., traffic cones, traffic barrels and traffic warning triangles) is an important perception task to improve the safety of autonomous driving. Training of such models typically requires a large number of annotated data which is expensive and time consuming to obtain. To address the above problem, an emerging approach is to apply data augmentation to automatically generate cost-free training samples. In this work, we propose a systematic study on simple Copy-Paste data augmentation for rare object detection in autonomous driving. Specifically, local adaptive instance-level image transformation is introduced to generate realistic rare object masks from source domain to the target domain. Moreover, traffic scene context is utilized to guide the placement of masks of rare objects. To this end, our data augmentation generates training data with high quality and realistic characteristics by leveraging both local and global consistency. In addition, we build a new dataset, Rare Object Dataset (ROD), consisting 10k training images, 4k validation images and the corresponding labels with a diverse range of scenarios in autonomous driving. Experiments on ROD show that our method achieves promising results on rare object detection. We also present a thorough study to illustrate the effectiveness of our local-adaptive and global constraints based Copy-Paste data augmentation for rare object detection. The data, development kit and more information of ROD are available online at: \url{https://nullmax-vision.github.io}.

Haoxuanye Ji, Pengpeng Liang, Erkang Cheng

Multi-camera-based 3D object detection has made notable progress in the past several years. However, we observe that there are cases (e.g. faraway regions) in which popular 2D object detectors are more reliable than state-of-the-art 3D detectors. In this paper, to improve the performance of query-based 3D object detectors, we present a novel query generating approach termed QAF2D, which infers 3D query anchors from 2D detection results. A 2D bounding box of an object in an image is lifted to a set of 3D anchors by associating each sampled point within the box with depth, yaw angle, and size candidates. Then, the validity of each 3D anchor is verified by comparing its projection in the image with its corresponding 2D box, and only valid anchors are kept and used to construct queries. The class information of the 2D bounding box associated with each query is also utilized to match the predicted boxes with ground truth for the set-based loss. The image feature extraction backbone is shared between the 3D detector and 2D detector by adding a small number of prompt parameters. We integrate QAF2D into three popular query-based 3D object detectors and carry out comprehensive evaluations on the nuScenes dataset. The largest improvement that QAF2D can bring about on the nuScenes validation subset is $2.3\%$ NDS and $2.7\%$ mAP. Code is available at https://github.com/nullmax-vision/QAF2D.

Yifeng Bai, Zhirong Chen, Erkang Cheng et al.

Topology reasoning is crucial for autonomous driving. Current methods primarily focus on instance-level learning for centerline detection, followed by a sequential module for topology reasoning that relies on simplified MLP layers. Moreover, they often neglect the importance of \textit{point-to-instance} (P2I) relationships in topology reasoning. To address these limitations, we present TopoHR (Topological Hierarchical Representation), a novel end-to-end framework that establishes cyclic interaction between centerline detection and topology reasoning, allowing them to iteratively enhance each other. Specifically, we introduce a hierarchical centerline representation including point queries, instance queries, and semantic representations. These multi-level features are seamlessly integrated and fused within a hierarchical centerline decoder. Furthermore, we design a hierarchical topology reasoning module that captures both fine-grained P2I relationships and global instance-to-instance (I2I) connections within a unified architecture. With these novel components, TopoHR ensures accurate and robust topology reasoning. On the OpenLane-V2 benchmark, TopoHR refreshes state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements. Notably, compared with previous best results, TopoHR achieves +3.8 in $\mathrm{DET}_{\text{l}}$, +5.4 in $\mathrm{TOP}_{\text{ll}}$ on $\text{subset_A}$ and +11.0 in $\mathrm{DET}_{\text{l}}$, +7.9 in $\mathrm{TOP}_{\text{ll}}$ on $\text{subset_B}$, validating the effectiveness of the proposed components. The code will be shared publicly at https://github.com/Yifeng-Bai/TopoHR.git.

Shihao Feng, Pengpeng Liang, Jin Gao et al.

Point cloud-based 3D object tracking is an important task in autonomous driving. Though great advances regarding Siamese-based 3D tracking have been made recently, it remains challenging to learn the correlation between the template and search branches effectively with the sparse LIDAR point cloud data. Instead of performing correlation of the two branches at just one point in the network, in this paper, we present a multi-correlation Siamese Transformer network that has multiple stages and carries out feature correlation at the end of each stage based on sparse pillars. More specifically, in each stage, self-attention is first applied to each branch separately to capture the non-local context information. Then, cross-attention is used to inject the template information into the search area. This strategy allows the feature learning of the search area to be aware of the template while keeping the individual characteristics of the template intact. To enable the network to easily preserve the information learned at different stages and ease the optimization, for the search area, we densely connect the initial input sparse pillars and the output of each stage to all subsequent stages and the target localization network, which converts pillars to bird's eye view (BEV) feature maps and predicts the state of the target with a small densely connected convolution network. Deep supervision is added to each stage to further boost the performance as well. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on the popular KITTI, nuScenes, and Waymo datasets, and the experimental results show that our method achieves promising performance compared with the state-of-the-art. Ablation study that shows the effectiveness of each component is provided as well. Code is available at https://github.com/liangp/MCSTN-3DSOT.

Yingqi Tang, Zhaotie Meng, Guoliang Chen et al.

The field of autonomous driving has attracted considerable interest in approaches that directly infer 3D objects in the Bird's Eye View (BEV) from multiple cameras. Some attempts have also explored utilizing 2D detectors from single images to enhance the performance of 3D detection. However, these approaches rely on a two-stage process with separate detectors, where the 2D detection results are utilized only once for token selection or query initialization. In this paper, we present a single model termed SimPB, which simultaneously detects 2D objects in the perspective view and 3D objects in the BEV space from multiple cameras. To achieve this, we introduce a hybrid decoder consisting of several multi-view 2D decoder layers and several 3D decoder layers, specifically designed for their respective detection tasks. A Dynamic Query Allocation module and an Adaptive Query Aggregation module are proposed to continuously update and refine the interaction between 2D and 3D results, in a cyclic 3D-2D-3D manner. Additionally, Query-group Attention is utilized to strengthen the interaction among 2D queries within each camera group. In the experiments, we evaluate our method on the nuScenes dataset and demonstrate promising results for both 2D and 3D detection tasks. Our code is available at: https://github.com/nullmax-vision/SimPB.

Yingqi Tang, Zhaotie Meng, Erkang Cheng et al.

Simultaneous perception of 2D objects in perspective view and 3D objects in Bird's Eye View (BEV) is challenging for multi-camera autonomous driving. Existing two-stage pipelines use 2D results only as a one-time cue for 3D detection. We propose SimPB++, which simultaneously detects 2D objects in perspective and 3D objects in BEV from multiple cameras. It unifies both tasks into an end-to-end model with a hybrid decoder architecture, coupling multi-view 2D and 3D decoders interactively. Two novel modules enable deep interaction: Dynamic Query Allocation adaptively assigns 2D queries to 3D candidates, and Adaptive Query Aggregation refines 3D representations using multi-view 2D features, forming a cyclic 3D-2D-3D refinement. For multi-view 2D detection, we use Query-group Attention for intra-group communication. We also design a Crop-and-Scale strategy for long-range perception and a Propagating Denoising strategy with an auxiliary RoI detector. SimPB++ supports mixed supervision with 2D-only and fully annotated data, reducing reliance on expensive 3D labels. Experiments show state-of-the-art performance on nuScenes for both tasks and strong long-range detection (up to 150m) on Argoverse2.

Yifeng Bai, Zhirong Chen, Pengpeng Liang et al.

In autonomous driving, accurate 3D lane detection using monocular cameras is important for downstream tasks. Recent CNN and Transformer approaches usually apply a two-stage model design. The first stage transforms the image feature from a front image into a bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation. Subsequently, a sub-network processes the BEV feature to generate the 3D detection results. However, these approaches heavily rely on a challenging image feature transformation module from a perspective view to a BEV representation. In our work, we present CurveFormer++, a single-stage Transformer-based method that does not require the view transform module and directly infers 3D lane results from the perspective image features. Specifically, our approach models the 3D lane detection task as a curve propagation problem, where each lane is represented by a curve query with a dynamic and ordered anchor point set. By employing a Transformer decoder, the model can iteratively refine the 3D lane results. A curve cross-attention module is introduced to calculate similarities between image features and curve queries. To handle varying lane lengths, we employ context sampling and anchor point restriction techniques to compute more relevant image features. Furthermore, we apply a temporal fusion module that incorporates selected informative sparse curve queries and their corresponding anchor point sets to leverage historical information. In the experiments, we evaluate our approach on two publicly real-world datasets. The results demonstrate that our method provides outstanding performance compared with both CNN and Transformer based methods. We also conduct ablation studies to analyze the impact of each component.

Yingqi Tang, Zhuoran Xu, Zhaotie Meng et al.

Although end-to-end autonomous driving (E2E-AD) technologies have made significant progress in recent years, there remains an unsatisfactory performance on closed-loop evaluation. The potential of leveraging planning in query design and interaction has not yet been fully explored. In this paper, we introduce a multi-granularity planning query representation that integrates heterogeneous waypoints, including spatial, temporal, and driving-style waypoints across various sampling patterns. It provides additional supervision for trajectory prediction, enhancing precise closed-loop control for the ego vehicle. Additionally, we explicitly utilize the geometric properties of planning trajectories to effectively retrieve relevant image features based on physical locations using deformable attention. By combining these strategies, we propose a novel end-to-end autonomous driving framework, termed HiP-AD, which simultaneously performs perception, prediction, and planning within a unified decoder. HiP-AD enables comprehensive interaction by allowing planning queries to iteratively interact with perception queries in the BEV space while dynamically extracting image features from perspective views. Experiments demonstrate that HiP-AD outperforms all existing end-to-end autonomous driving methods on the closed-loop benchmark Bench2Drive and achieves competitive performance on the real-world dataset nuScenes.

Liuhan Yin, Runkun Ju, Guodong Guo et al.

Unlike discriminative approaches in autonomous driving that predict a fixed set of candidate trajectories of the ego vehicle, generative methods, such as diffusion models, learn the underlying distribution of future motion, enabling more flexible trajectory prediction. However, since these methods typically rely on denoising human-crafted trajectory anchors or random noise, there remains significant room for improvement. In this paper, we propose DiffRefiner, a novel two-stage trajectory prediction framework. The first stage uses a transformer-based Proposal Decoder to generate coarse trajectory predictions by regressing from sensor inputs using predefined trajectory anchors. The second stage applies a Diffusion Refiner that iteratively denoises and refines these initial predictions. In this way, we enhance the performance of diffusion-based planning by incorporating a discriminative trajectory proposal module, which provides strong guidance for the generative refinement process. Furthermore, we design a fine-grained denoising decoder to enhance scene compliance, enabling more accurate trajectory prediction through enhanced alignment with the surrounding environment. Experimental results demonstrate that DiffRefiner achieves state-of-the-art performance, attaining 87.4 EPDMS on NAVSIM v2, and 87.1 DS along with 71.4 SR on Bench2Drive, thereby setting new records on both public benchmarks. The effectiveness of each component is validated via ablation studies as well.

Chengcheng Guo, Minjie Lin, Heyang Guo et al.

Robust and accurate localization is an essential component for robotic navigation and autonomous driving. The use of cameras for localization with high definition map (HD Map) provides an affordable localization sensor set. Existing methods suffer from pose estimation failure due to error prone data association or initialization with accurate initial pose requirement. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective vehicle localization system with HD map for autonomous driving that uses cameras as primary sensors. To this end, we formulate vision-based localization as a data association problem that maps visual semantics to landmarks in HD map. Specifically, system initialization is finished in a coarse to fine manner by combining coarse GPS (Global Positioning System) measurement and fine pose searching. In tracking stage, vehicle pose is refined by implicitly aligning the semantic segmentation result between image and landmarks in HD maps with photometric consistency. Finally, vehicle pose is computed by pose graph optimization in a sliding window fashion. We evaluate our method on two datasets and demonstrate that the proposed approach yields promising localization results in different driving scenarios. Additionally, our approach is suitable for both monocular camera and multi-cameras that provides flexibility and improves robustness for the localization system.