Li Zheng

Li Zeqiao, Wang Yijing, Wang Haoyu et al.

Autonomous driving promises significant advancements in mobility, road safety and traffic efficiency, yet reinforcement learning and imitation learning face safe-exploration and distribution-shift challenges. Although human-AI collaboration alleviates these issues, it often relies heavily on extensive human intervention, which increases costs and reduces efficiency. This paper develops a confidence-guided human-AI collaboration (C-HAC) strategy to overcome these limitations. First, C-HAC employs a distributional proxy value propagation method within the distributional soft actor-critic (DSAC) framework. By leveraging return distributions to represent human intentions C-HAC achieves rapid and stable learning of human-guided policies with minimal human interaction. Subsequently, a shared control mechanism is activated to integrate the learned human-guided policy with a self-learning policy that maximizes cumulative rewards. This enables the agent to explore independently and continuously enhance its performance beyond human guidance. Finally, a policy confidence evaluation algorithm capitalizes on DSAC's return distribution networks to facilitate dynamic switching between human-guided and self-learning policies via a confidence-based intervention function. This ensures the agent can pursue optimal policies while maintaining safety and performance guarantees. Extensive experiments across diverse driving scenarios reveal that C-HAC significantly outperforms conventional methods in terms of safety, efficiency, and overall performance, achieving state-of-the-art results. The effectiveness of the proposed method is further validated through real-world road tests in complex traffic conditions. The videos and code are available at: https://github.com/lzqw/C-HAC.

Shengling Qin, Hao Yu, Chenxin Wu et al.

This paper presents VLCache, a cache reuse framework that exploits both Key-Value (KV) cache and encoder cache from prior multimodal inputs to eliminate costly recomputation when the same multimodal inputs recur. Unlike previous heuristic approaches, we formally identify the cumulative reuse error effect and demonstrate how to minimize the non-prefix cache reuse error effectively. We further analyze the varying importance of model layers and propose a dynamic, layer-aware recomputation strategy to balance accuracy and efficiency. Experimental results show that VLCache achieves an accuracy on par with full recomputation, while requiring only 2-5% of the tokens to compute, yielding 1.2x-16x TTFT speedups. We develop an experimental implementation of the proposed VLCache pipeline based on SGLang, enabling significantly faster inference in practical deployments.

Li Zeqiao, Wang Yijing, Wang Haoyu et al.

Autonomous driving with reinforcement learning (RL) has significant potential. However, applying RL in real-world settings remains challenging due to the need for safe, efficient, and robust learning. Incorporating human expertise into the learning process can help overcome these challenges by reducing risky exploration and improving sample efficiency. In this work, we propose a reward-free, active human-in-the-loop learning method called Human-Guided Distributional Soft Actor-Critic (H-DSAC). Our method combines Proxy Value Propagation (PVP) and Distributional Soft Actor-Critic (DSAC) to enable efficient and safe training in real-world environments. The key innovation is the construction of a distributed proxy value function within the DSAC framework. This function encodes human intent by assigning higher expected returns to expert demonstrations and penalizing actions that require human intervention. By extrapolating these labels to unlabeled states, the policy is effectively guided toward expert-like behavior. With a well-designed state space, our method achieves real-world driving policy learning within practical training times. Results from both simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that our framework enables safe, robust, and sample-efficient learning for autonomous driving.

Zheng Li, Ying Huang, Defang Chen et al.

Knowledge distillation is an effective method to transfer the knowledge from the cumbersome teacher model to the lightweight student model. Online knowledge distillation uses the ensembled prediction results of multiple student models as soft targets to train each student model. However, the homogenization problem will lead to difficulty in further improving model performance. In this work, we propose a new distillation method to enhance the diversity among multiple student models. We introduce Feature Fusion Module (FFM), which improves the performance of the attention mechanism in the network by integrating rich semantic information contained in the last block of multiple student models. Furthermore, we use the Classifier Diversification(CD) loss function to strengthen the differences between the student models and deliver a better ensemble result. Extensive experiments proved that our method significantly enhances the diversity among student models and brings better distillation performance. We evaluate our method on three image classification datasets: CIFAR-10/100 and CINIC-10. The results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on these datasets.