Hongyang Li

Li Chen, Penghao Wu, Kashyap Chitta et al. · pku

The autonomous driving community has witnessed a rapid growth in approaches that embrace an end-to-end algorithm framework, utilizing raw sensor input to generate vehicle motion plans, instead of concentrating on individual tasks such as detection and motion prediction. End-to-end systems, in comparison to modular pipelines, benefit from joint feature optimization for perception and planning. This field has flourished due to the availability of large-scale datasets, closed-loop evaluation, and the increasing need for autonomous driving algorithms to perform effectively in challenging scenarios. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive analysis of more than 270 papers, covering the motivation, roadmap, methodology, challenges, and future trends in end-to-end autonomous driving. We delve into several critical challenges, including multi-modality, interpretability, causal confusion, robustness, and world models, amongst others. Additionally, we discuss current advancements in foundation models and visual pre-training, as well as how to incorporate these techniques within the end-to-end driving framework. we maintain an active repository that contains up-to-date literature and open-source projects at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/End-to-end-Autonomous-Driving.

Penghao Wu, Xiaosong Jia, Li Chen et al. · pku

Current end-to-end autonomous driving methods either run a controller based on a planned trajectory or perform control prediction directly, which have spanned two separately studied lines of research. Seeing their potential mutual benefits to each other, this paper takes the initiative to explore the combination of these two well-developed worlds. Specifically, our integrated approach has two branches for trajectory planning and direct control, respectively. The trajectory branch predicts the future trajectory, while the control branch involves a novel multi-step prediction scheme such that the relationship between current actions and future states can be reasoned. The two branches are connected so that the control branch receives corresponding guidance from the trajectory branch at each time step. The outputs from two branches are then fused to achieve complementary advantages. Our results are evaluated in the closed-loop urban driving setting with challenging scenarios using the CARLA simulator. Even with a monocular camera input, the proposed approach ranks first on the official CARLA Leaderboard, outperforming other complex candidates with multiple sensors or fusion mechanisms by a large margin. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/OpenPerceptionX/TCP

Li Chen, Chonghao Sima, Yang Li et al.

Methods for 3D lane detection have been recently proposed to address the issue of inaccurate lane layouts in many autonomous driving scenarios (uphill/downhill, bump, etc.). Previous work struggled in complex cases due to their simple designs of the spatial transformation between front view and bird's eye view (BEV) and the lack of a realistic dataset. Towards these issues, we present PersFormer: an end-to-end monocular 3D lane detector with a novel Transformer-based spatial feature transformation module. Our model generates BEV features by attending to related front-view local regions with camera parameters as a reference. PersFormer adopts a unified 2D/3D anchor design and an auxiliary task to detect 2D/3D lanes simultaneously, enhancing the feature consistency and sharing the benefits of multi-task learning. Moreover, we release one of the first large-scale real-world 3D lane datasets: OpenLane, with high-quality annotation and scenario diversity. OpenLane contains 200,000 frames, over 880,000 instance-level lanes, 14 lane categories, along with scene tags and the closed-in-path object annotations to encourage the development of lane detection and more industrial-related autonomous driving methods. We show that PersFormer significantly outperforms competitive baselines in the 3D lane detection task on our new OpenLane dataset as well as Apollo 3D Lane Synthetic dataset, and is also on par with state-of-the-art algorithms in the 2D task on OpenLane. The project page is available at https://github.com/OpenPerceptionX/PersFormer_3DLane and OpenLane dataset is provided at https://github.com/OpenPerceptionX/OpenLane.

Chonghao Sima, Wenwen Tong, Tai Wang et al. · pku

Human driver can easily describe the complex traffic scene by visual system. Such an ability of precise perception is essential for driver's planning. To achieve this, a geometry-aware representation that quantizes the physical 3D scene into structured grid map with semantic labels per cell, termed as 3D Occupancy, would be desirable. Compared to the form of bounding box, a key insight behind occupancy is that it could capture the fine-grained details of critical obstacles in the scene, and thereby facilitate subsequent tasks. Prior or concurrent literature mainly concentrate on a single scene completion task, where we might argue that the potential of this occupancy representation might obsess broader impact. In this paper, we propose OccNet, a multi-view vision-centric pipeline with a cascade and temporal voxel decoder to reconstruct 3D occupancy. At the core of OccNet is a general occupancy embedding to represent 3D physical world. Such a descriptor could be applied towards a wide span of driving tasks, including detection, segmentation and planning. To validate the effectiveness of this new representation and our proposed algorithm, we propose OpenOcc, the first dense high-quality 3D occupancy benchmark built on top of nuScenes. Empirical experiments show that there are evident performance gain across multiple tasks, e.g., motion planning could witness a collision rate reduction by 15%-58%, demonstrating the superiority of our method.

Xiaosong Jia, Penghao Wu, Li Chen et al. · pku

Encoding a driving scene into vector representations has been an essential task for autonomous driving that can benefit downstream tasks e.g. trajectory prediction. The driving scene often involves heterogeneous elements such as the different types of objects (agents, lanes, traffic signs) and the semantic relations between objects are rich and diverse. Meanwhile, there also exist relativity across elements, which means that the spatial relation is a relative concept and need be encoded in a ego-centric manner instead of in a global coordinate system. Based on these observations, we propose Heterogeneous Driving Graph Transformer (HDGT), a backbone modelling the driving scene as a heterogeneous graph with different types of nodes and edges. For heterogeneous graph construction, we connect different types of nodes according to diverse semantic relations. For spatial relation encoding, the coordinates of the node as well as its in-edges are in the local node-centric coordinate system. For the aggregation module in the graph neural network (GNN), we adopt the transformer structure in a hierarchical way to fit the heterogeneous nature of inputs. Experimental results show that HDGT achieves state-of-the-art performance for the task of trajectory prediction, on INTERACTION Prediction Challenge and Waymo Open Motion Challenge.

Shilong Liu, Tianhe Ren, Jiayu Chen et al.

This paper is concerned with the matching stability problem across different decoder layers in DEtection TRansformers (DETR). We point out that the unstable matching in DETR is caused by a multi-optimization path problem, which is highlighted by the one-to-one matching design in DETR. To address this problem, we show that the most important design is to use and only use positional metrics (like IOU) to supervise classification scores of positive examples. Under the principle, we propose two simple yet effective modifications by integrating positional metrics to DETR's classification loss and matching cost, named position-supervised loss and position-modulated cost. We verify our methods on several DETR variants. Our methods show consistent improvements over baselines. By integrating our methods with DINO, we achieve 50.4 and 51.5 AP on the COCO detection benchmark using ResNet-50 backbones under 12 epochs and 24 epochs training settings, achieving a new record under the same setting. We achieve 63.8 AP on COCO detection test-dev with a Swin-Large backbone. Our code will be made available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/Stable-DINO.

Huijie Wang, Tianyu Li, Yang Li et al.

Accurately depicting the complex traffic scene is a vital component for autonomous vehicles to execute correct judgments. However, existing benchmarks tend to oversimplify the scene by solely focusing on lane perception tasks. Observing that human drivers rely on both lanes and traffic signals to operate their vehicles safely, we present OpenLane-V2, the first dataset on topology reasoning for traffic scene structure. The objective of the presented dataset is to advance research in understanding the structure of road scenes by examining the relationship between perceived entities, such as traffic elements and lanes. Leveraging existing datasets, OpenLane-V2 consists of 2,000 annotated road scenes that describe traffic elements and their correlation to the lanes. It comprises three primary sub-tasks, including the 3D lane detection inherited from OpenLane, accompanied by corresponding metrics to evaluate the model's performance. We evaluate various state-of-the-art methods, and present their quantitative and qualitative results on OpenLane-V2 to indicate future avenues for investigating topology reasoning in traffic scenes.

Tianyu Li, Peijin Jia, Bangjun Wang et al.

A map, as crucial information for downstream applications of an autonomous driving system, is usually represented in lanelines or centerlines. However, existing literature on map learning primarily focuses on either detecting geometry-based lanelines or perceiving topology relationships of centerlines. Both of these methods ignore the intrinsic relationship of lanelines and centerlines, that lanelines bind centerlines. While simply predicting both types of lane in one model is mutually excluded in learning objective, we advocate lane segment as a new representation that seamlessly incorporates both geometry and topology information. Thus, we introduce LaneSegNet, the first end-to-end mapping network generating lane segments to obtain a complete representation of the road structure. Our algorithm features two key modifications. One is a lane attention module to capture pivotal region details within the long-range feature space. Another is an identical initialization strategy for reference points, which enhances the learning of positional priors for lane attention. On the OpenLane-V2 dataset, LaneSegNet outperforms previous counterparts by a substantial gain across three tasks, \textit{i.e.}, map element detection (+4.8 mAP), centerline perception (+6.9 DET$_l$), and the newly defined one, lane segment perception (+5.6 mAP). Furthermore, it obtains a real-time inference speed of 14.7 FPS. Code is accessible at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/LaneSegNet.

Yifei Zhang, Hao Zhao, Hongyang Li et al.

3D correspondence, i.e., a pair of 3D points, is a fundamental concept in computer vision. A set of 3D correspondences, when equipped with compatibility edges, forms a correspondence graph. This graph is a critical component in several state-of-the-art 3D point cloud registration approaches, e.g., the one based on maximal cliques (MAC). However, its properties have not been well understood. So we present the first study that introduces graph signal processing into the domain of correspondence graph. We exploit the generalized degree signal on correspondence graph and pursue sampling strategies that preserve high-frequency components of this signal. To address time-consuming singular value decomposition in deterministic sampling, we resort to a stochastic approximate sampling strategy. As such, the core of our method is the stochastic spectral sampling of correspondence graph. As an application, we build a complete 3D registration algorithm termed as FastMAC, that reaches real-time speed while leading to little to none performance drop. Through extensive experiments, we validate that FastMAC works for both indoor and outdoor benchmarks. For example, FastMAC can accelerate MAC by 80 times while maintaining high registration success rate on KITTI. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/Forrest-110/FastMAC.

Chonghao Sima, Katrin Renz, Kashyap Chitta et al.

We study how vision-language models (VLMs) trained on web-scale data can be integrated into end-to-end driving systems to boost generalization and enable interactivity with human users. While recent approaches adapt VLMs to driving via single-round visual question answering (VQA), human drivers reason about decisions in multiple steps. Starting from the localization of key objects, humans estimate object interactions before taking actions. The key insight is that with our proposed task, Graph VQA, where we model graph-structured reasoning through perception, prediction and planning question-answer pairs, we obtain a suitable proxy task to mimic the human reasoning process. We instantiate datasets (DriveLM-Data) built upon nuScenes and CARLA, and propose a VLM-based baseline approach (DriveLM-Agent) for jointly performing Graph VQA and end-to-end driving. The experiments demonstrate that Graph VQA provides a simple, principled framework for reasoning about a driving scene, and DriveLM-Data provides a challenging benchmark for this task. Our DriveLM-Agent baseline performs end-to-end autonomous driving competitively in comparison to state-of-the-art driving-specific architectures. Notably, its benefits are pronounced when it is evaluated zero-shot on unseen objects or sensor configurations. We hope this work can be the starting point to shed new light on how to apply VLMs for autonomous driving. To facilitate future research, all code, data, and models are available to the public.

Xiaoxue Chen, Ziyi Xiong, Yuantao Chen et al.

Autonomous driving needs fast, scalable 4D reconstruction and re-simulation for training and evaluation, yet most methods for dynamic driving scenes still rely on per-scene optimization, known camera calibration, or short frame windows, making them slow and impractical. We revisit this problem from a feedforward perspective and introduce \textbf{Driving Gaussian Grounded Transformer (DGGT)}, a unified framework for pose-free dynamic scene reconstruction. We note that the existing formulations, treating camera pose as a required input, limit flexibility and scalability. Instead, we reformulate pose as an output of the model, enabling reconstruction directly from sparse, unposed images and supporting an arbitrary number of views for long sequences. Our approach jointly predicts per-frame 3D Gaussian maps and camera parameters, disentangles dynamics with a lightweight dynamic head, and preserves temporal consistency with a lifespan head that modulates visibility over time. A diffusion-based rendering refinement further reduces motion/interpolation artifacts and improves novel-view quality under sparse inputs. The result is a single-pass, pose-free algorithm that achieves state-of-the-art performance and speed. Trained and evaluated on large-scale driving benchmarks (Waymo, nuScenes, Argoverse2), our method outperforms prior work both when trained on each dataset and in zero-shot transfer across datasets, and it scales well as the number of input frames increases.

Chonghao Sima, Kashyap Chitta, Zhiding Yu et al.

How can we rely on an end-to-end autonomous vehicle's complex decision-making system during deployment? One common solution is to have a ``fallback layer'' that checks the planned trajectory for rule violations and replaces it with a pre-defined safe action if necessary. Another approach involves adjusting the planner's decisions to minimize a pre-defined ``cost function'' using additional system predictions such as road layouts and detected obstacles. However, these pre-programmed rules or cost functions cannot learn and improve with new training data, often resulting in overly conservative behaviors. In this work, we propose Centaur (Cluster Entropy for Test-time trAining using Uncertainty) which updates a planner's behavior via test-time training, without relying on hand-engineered rules or cost functions. Instead, we measure and minimize the uncertainty in the planner's decisions. For this, we develop a novel uncertainty measure, called Cluster Entropy, which is simple, interpretable, and compatible with state-of-the-art planning algorithms. Using data collected at prior test-time time-steps, we perform an update to the model's parameters using a gradient that minimizes the Cluster Entropy. With only this sole gradient update prior to inference, Centaur exhibits significant improvements, ranking first on the navtest leaderboard with notable gains in safety-critical metrics such as time to collision. To provide detailed insights on a per-scenario basis, we also introduce navsafe, a challenging new benchmark, which highlights previously undiscovered failure modes of driving models.

Hongyang Li, Junyi Tao, Qijie Wei et al.

Previous work on cross-modal fundus image registration (CMFIR) assumes small cross-modal Field-of-View (FoV) disparity. By contrast, this paper is targeted at a more challenging scenario with large FoV disparity, to which directly applying current methods fails. We propose Crop and Alignment for cross-modal fundus image Registration(CARe), a very simple yet effective method. Specifically, given an OCTA with smaller FoV as a source image and a wide-field color fundus photograph (wfCFP) as a target image, our Crop operation exploits the physiological structure of the retina to crop from the target image a sub-image with its FoV roughly aligned with that of the source. This operation allows us to re-purpose the previous small-FoV-disparity oriented methods for subsequent image registration. Moreover, we improve spatial transformation by a double-fitting based Alignment module that utilizes the classical RANSAC algorithm and polynomial-based coordinate fitting in a sequential manner. Extensive experiments on a newly developed test set of 60 OCTA-wfCFP pairs verify the viability of CARe for CMFIR.

Xiangru Li, Wei Song, Yingda Huang et al.

Gait recognition enables contact-free, long-range person identification that is robust to clothing variations and non-cooperative scenarios. While existing methods perform well in controlled indoor environments, they struggle with cross-vertical view scenarios, where surveillance angles vary significantly in elevation. Our experiments show up to 60\% accuracy degradation in low-to-high vertical view settings due to severe deformations and self-occlusions of key anatomical features. Current CNN and self-attention-based methods fail to effectively handle these challenges, due to their reliance on single-scale convolutions or simplistic attention mechanisms that lack effective multi-frequency feature integration. To tackle this challenge, we propose CVVNet (Cross-Vertical-View Network), a frequency aggregation architecture specifically designed for robust cross-vertical-view gait recognition. CVVNet employs a High-Low Frequency Extraction module (HLFE) that adopts parallel multi-scale convolution/max-pooling path and self-attention path as high- and low-frequency mixers for effective multi-frequency feature extraction from input silhouettes. We also introduce the Dynamic Gated Aggregation (DGA) mechanism to adaptively adjust the fusion ratio of high- and low-frequency features. The integration of our core Multi-Scale Attention Gated Aggregation (MSAGA) module, HLFE and DGA enables CVVNet to effectively handle distortions from view changes, significantly improving the recognition robustness across different vertical views. Experimental results show that our CVVNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, with $8.6\%$ improvement on DroneGait and $2\%$ on Gait3D compared with the best existing methods.

Jiamin Wu, Hongyang Li, Xiaoke Jiang et al.

In this work, we introduce Coca-Splat, a novel approach to addressing the challenges of sparse view pose-free scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis (NVS) by jointly optimizing camera parameters with 3D Gaussians. Inspired by deformable DEtection TRansformer, we design separate queries for 3D Gaussians and camera parameters and update them layer by layer through deformable Transformer layers, enabling joint optimization in a single network. This design demonstrates better performance because to accurately render views that closely approximate ground-truth images relies on precise estimation of both 3D Gaussians and camera parameters. In such a design, the centers of 3D Gaussians are projected onto each view by camera parameters to get projected points, which are regarded as 2D reference points in deformable cross-attention. With camera-aware multi-view deformable cross-attention (CaMDFA), 3D Gaussians and camera parameters are intrinsically connected by sharing the 2D reference points. Additionally, 2D reference point determined rays (RayRef) defined from camera centers to the reference points assist in modeling relationship between 3D Gaussians and camera parameters through RQ-decomposition on an overdetermined system of equations derived from the rays, enhancing the relationship between 3D Gaussians and camera parameters. Extensive evaluation shows that our approach outperforms previous methods, both pose-required and pose-free, on RealEstate10K and ACID within the same pose-free setting.

Hongyang Li, Hao Zhang, Shilong Liu et al.

In this paper, we propose a simple and strong framework for Tracking Any Point with TRansformers (TAPTR). Based on the observation that point tracking bears a great resemblance to object detection and tracking, we borrow designs from DETR-like algorithms to address the task of TAP. In the proposed framework, in each video frame, each tracking point is represented as a point query, which consists of a positional part and a content part. As in DETR, each query (its position and content feature) is naturally updated layer by layer. Its visibility is predicted by its updated content feature. Queries belonging to the same tracking point can exchange information through self-attention along the temporal dimension. As all such operations are well-designed in DETR-like algorithms, the model is conceptually very simple. We also adopt some useful designs such as cost volume from optical flow models and develop simple designs to provide long temporal information while mitigating the feature drifting issue. Our framework demonstrates strong performance with state-of-the-art performance on various TAP datasets with faster inference speed.

Tianhe Ren, Shilong Liu, Ailing Zeng et al.

We introduce Grounded SAM, which uses Grounding DINO as an open-set object detector to combine with the segment anything model (SAM). This integration enables the detection and segmentation of any regions based on arbitrary text inputs and opens a door to connecting various vision models. As shown in Fig.1, a wide range of vision tasks can be achieved by using the versatile Grounded SAM pipeline. For example, an automatic annotation pipeline based solely on input images can be realized by incorporating models such as BLIP and Recognize Anything. Additionally, incorporating Stable-Diffusion allows for controllable image editing, while the integration of OSX facilitates promptable 3D human motion analysis. Grounded SAM also shows superior performance on open-vocabulary benchmarks, achieving 48.7 mean AP on SegInW (Segmentation in the wild) zero-shot benchmark with the combination of Grounding DINO-Base and SAM-Huge models.

Xiaosong Jia, Penghao Wu, Li Chen et al.

End-to-end autonomous driving has made impressive progress in recent years. Existing methods usually adopt the decoupled encoder-decoder paradigm, where the encoder extracts hidden features from raw sensor data, and the decoder outputs the ego-vehicle's future trajectories or actions. Under such a paradigm, the encoder does not have access to the intended behavior of the ego agent, leaving the burden of finding out safety-critical regions from the massive receptive field and inferring about future situations to the decoder. Even worse, the decoder is usually composed of several simple multi-layer perceptrons (MLP) or GRUs while the encoder is delicately designed (e.g., a combination of heavy ResNets or Transformer). Such an imbalanced resource-task division hampers the learning process. In this work, we aim to alleviate the aforementioned problem by two principles: (1) fully utilizing the capacity of the encoder; (2) increasing the capacity of the decoder. Concretely, we first predict a coarse-grained future position and action based on the encoder features. Then, conditioned on the position and action, the future scene is imagined to check the ramification if we drive accordingly. We also retrieve the encoder features around the predicted coordinate to obtain fine-grained information about the safety-critical region. Finally, based on the predicted future and the retrieved salient feature, we refine the coarse-grained position and action by predicting its offset from ground-truth. The above refinement module could be stacked in a cascaded fashion, which extends the capacity of the decoder with spatial-temporal prior knowledge about the conditioned future. We conduct experiments on the CARLA simulator and achieve state-of-the-art performance in closed-loop benchmarks. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each proposed module.

Shichao Li, Zengqiang Yan, Hongyang Li et al.

We present a new learning-based framework to recover vehicle pose in SO(3) from a single RGB image. In contrast to previous works that map from local appearance to observation angles, we explore a progressive approach by extracting meaningful Intermediate Geometrical Representations (IGRs) to estimate egocentric vehicle orientation. This approach features a deep model that transforms perceived intensities to IGRs, which are mapped to a 3D representation encoding object orientation in the camera coordinate system. Core problems are what IGRs to use and how to learn them more effectively. We answer the former question by designing IGRs based on an interpolated cuboid that derives from primitive 3D annotation readily. The latter question motivates us to incorporate geometry knowledge with a new loss function based on a projective invariant. This loss function allows unlabeled data to be used in the training stage to improve representation learning. Without additional labels, our system outperforms previous monocular RGB-based methods for joint vehicle detection and pose estimation on the KITTI benchmark, achieving performance even comparable to stereo methods. Code and pre-trained models are available at this https URL.

Hongyang Li, David Eigen, Samuel Dodge et al.

Few-shot learning is an important area of research. Conceptually, humans are readily able to understand new concepts given just a few examples, while in more pragmatic terms, limited-example training situations are common in practice. Recent effective approaches to few-shot learning employ a metric-learning framework to learn a feature similarity comparison between a query (test) example, and the few support (training) examples. However, these approaches treat each support class independently from one another, never looking at the entire task as a whole. Because of this, they are constrained to use a single set of features for all possible test-time tasks, which hinders the ability to distinguish the most relevant dimensions for the task at hand. In this work, we introduce a Category Traversal Module that can be inserted as a plug-and-play module into most metric-learning based few-shot learners. This component traverses across the entire support set at once, identifying task-relevant features based on both intra-class commonality and inter-class uniqueness in the feature space. Incorporating our module improves performance considerably (5%-10% relative) over baseline systems on both mini-ImageNet and tieredImageNet benchmarks, with overall performance competitive with recent state-of-the-art systems.

Zhizhen Chi, Hongyang Li, Huchuan Lu et al.

Visual tracking addresses the problem of identifying and localizing an unknown target in a video given the target specified by a bounding box in the first frame. In this paper, we propose a dual network to better utilize features among layers for visual tracking. It is observed that features in higher layers encode semantic context while its counterparts in lower layers are sensitive to discriminative appearance. Thus we exploit the hierarchical features in different layers of a deep model and design a dual structure to obtain better feature representation from various streams, which is rarely investigated in previous work. To highlight geometric contours of the target, we integrate the hierarchical feature maps with an edge detector as the coarse prior maps to further embed local details around the target. To leverage the robustness of our dual network, we train it with random patches measuring the similarities between the network activation and target appearance, which serves as a regularization to enforce the dual network to focus on target object. The proposed dual network is updated online in a unique manner based on the observation that the target being tracked in consecutive frames should share more similar feature representations than those in the surrounding background. It is also found that for a target object, the prior maps can help further enhance performance by passing message into the output maps of the dual network. Therefore, an independent component analysis with reference algorithm (ICA-R) is employed to extract target context using prior maps as guidance. Online tracking is conducted by maximizing the posterior estimate on the final maps with stochastic and periodic update. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on two large-scale benchmark data sets show that the proposed algorithm performs favourably against the state-of-the-arts.