Ke Wang

Xinyu Zhang, Li Wang, Jian Chen et al.

Radar has stronger adaptability in adverse scenarios for autonomous driving environmental perception compared to widely adopted cameras and LiDARs. Compared with commonly used 3D radars, the latest 4D radars have precise vertical resolution and higher point cloud density, making it a highly promising sensor for autonomous driving in complex environmental perception. However, due to the much higher noise than LiDAR, manufacturers choose different filtering strategies, resulting in an inverse ratio between noise level and point cloud density. There is still a lack of comparative analysis on which method is beneficial for deep learning-based perception algorithms in autonomous driving. One of the main reasons is that current datasets only adopt one type of 4D radar, making it difficult to compare different 4D radars in the same scene. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel large-scale multi-modal dataset featuring, for the first time, two types of 4D radars captured simultaneously. This dataset enables further research into effective 4D radar perception algorithms.Our dataset consists of 151 consecutive series, most of which last 20 seconds and contain 10,007 meticulously synchronized and annotated frames. Moreover, our dataset captures a variety of challenging driving scenarios, including many road conditions, weather conditions, nighttime and daytime with different lighting intensities and periods. Our dataset annotates consecutive frames, which can be applied to 3D object detection and tracking, and also supports the study of multi-modal tasks. We experimentally validate our dataset, providing valuable results for studying different types of 4D radars. This dataset is released on https://github.com/adept-thu/Dual-Radar.

Kun Dai, Tao Xie, Ke Wang et al.

Local feature matching is an essential component in many visual applications. In this work, we propose OAMatcher, a Tranformer-based detector-free method that imitates humans behavior to generate dense and accurate matches. Firstly, OAMatcher predicts overlapping areas to promote effective and clean global context aggregation, with the key insight that humans focus on the overlapping areas instead of the entire images after multiple observations when matching keypoints in image pairs. Technically, we first perform global information integration across all keypoints to imitate the humans behavior of observing the entire images at the beginning of feature matching. Then, we propose Overlapping Areas Prediction Module (OAPM) to capture the keypoints in co-visible regions and conduct feature enhancement among them to simulate that humans transit the focus regions from the entire images to overlapping regions, hence realizeing effective information exchange without the interference coming from the keypoints in non overlapping areas. Besides, since humans tend to leverage probability to determine whether the match labels are correct or not, we propose a Match Labels Weight Strategy (MLWS) to generate the coefficients used to appraise the reliability of the ground-truth match labels, while alleviating the influence of measurement noise coming from the data. Moreover, we integrate depth-wise convolution into Tranformer encoder layers to ensure OAMatcher extracts local and global feature representation concurrently. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that OAMatcher outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks, while exhibiting excellent robustness to extreme appearance variants. The source code is available at https://github.com/DK-HU/OAMatcher.

Tao Xie, Kun Dai, Siyi Lu et al.

In this work, we seek to predict camera poses across scenes with a multi-task learning manner, where we view the localization of each scene as a new task. We propose OFVL-MS, a unified framework that dispenses with the traditional practice of training a model for each individual scene and relieves gradient conflict induced by optimizing multiple scenes collectively, enabling efficient storage yet precise visual localization for all scenes. Technically, in the forward pass of OFVL-MS, we design a layer-adaptive sharing policy with a learnable score for each layer to automatically determine whether the layer is shared or not. Such sharing policy empowers us to acquire task-shared parameters for a reduction of storage cost and task-specific parameters for learning scene-related features to alleviate gradient conflict. In the backward pass of OFVL-MS, we introduce a gradient normalization algorithm that homogenizes the gradient magnitude of the task-shared parameters so that all tasks converge at the same pace. Furthermore, a sparse penalty loss is applied on the learnable scores to facilitate parameter sharing for all tasks without performance degradation. We conduct comprehensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and our new released indoor dataset LIVL, showing that OFVL-MS families significantly outperform the state-of-the-arts with fewer parameters. We also verify that OFVL-MS can generalize to a new scene with much few parameters while gaining superior localization performance.

Li Wang, Xinyu Zhang, Fachuan Zhao et al.

Non-maximum suppression (NMS) is an essential post-processing module used in many 3D object detection frameworks to remove overlapping candidate bounding boxes. However, an overreliance on classification scores and difficulties in determining appropriate thresholds can affect the resulting accuracy directly. To address these issues, we introduce fuzzy learning into NMS and propose a novel generalized Fuzzy-NMS module to achieve finer candidate bounding box filtering. The proposed Fuzzy-NMS module combines the volume and clustering density of candidate bounding boxes, refining them with a fuzzy classification method and optimizing the appropriate suppression thresholds to reduce uncertainty in the NMS process. Adequate validation experiments are conducted using the mainstream KITTI and large-scale Waymo 3D object detection benchmarks. The results of these tests demonstrate the proposed Fuzzy-NMS module can improve the accuracy of numerous recently NMS-based detectors significantly, including PointPillars, PV-RCNN, and IA-SSD, etc. This effect is particularly evident for small objects such as pedestrians and bicycles. As a plug-and-play module, Fuzzy-NMS does not need to be retrained and produces no obvious increases in inference time.

Lei Yang, Xinyu Zhang, Jun Li et al.

Modern autonomous vehicle perception systems often struggle with occlusions and limited perception range. Previous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of cooperative perception in extending the perception range and overcoming occlusions, thereby enhancing the safety of autonomous driving. In recent years, a series of cooperative perception datasets have emerged; however, these datasets primarily focus on cameras and LiDAR, neglecting 4D Radar, a sensor used in single-vehicle autonomous driving to provide robust perception in adverse weather conditions. In this paper, to bridge the gap created by the absence of 4D Radar datasets in cooperative perception, we present V2X-Radar, the first large-scale, real-world multi-modal dataset featuring 4D Radar. V2X-Radar dataset is collected using a connected vehicle platform and an intelligent roadside unit equipped with 4D Radar, LiDAR, and multi-view cameras. The collected data encompasses sunny and rainy weather conditions, spanning daytime, dusk, and nighttime, as well as various typical challenging scenarios. The dataset consists of 20K LiDAR frames, 40K camera images, and 20K 4D Radar data, including 350K annotated boxes across five categories. To support various research domains, we have established V2X-Radar-C for cooperative perception, V2X-Radar-I for roadside perception, and V2X-Radar-V for single-vehicle perception. Furthermore, we provide comprehensive benchmarks across these three sub-datasets. We will release all datasets and benchmark codebase at https://huggingface.co/datasets/yanglei18/V2X-Radar and https://github.com/yanglei18/V2X-Radar.

Mingzhe Guo, Zhipeng Zhang, Yuan He et al.

We propose UAD, a method for vision-based end-to-end autonomous driving (E2EAD), achieving the best open-loop evaluation performance in nuScenes, meanwhile showing robust closed-loop driving quality in CARLA. Our motivation stems from the observation that current E2EAD models still mimic the modular architecture in typical driving stacks, with carefully designed supervised perception and prediction subtasks to provide environment information for oriented planning. Although achieving groundbreaking progress, such design has certain drawbacks: 1) preceding subtasks require massive high-quality 3D annotations as supervision, posing a significant impediment to scaling the training data; 2) each submodule entails substantial computation overhead in both training and inference. To this end, we propose UAD, an E2EAD framework with an unsupervised proxy to address all these issues. Firstly, we design a novel Angular Perception Pretext to eliminate the annotation requirement. The pretext models the driving scene by predicting the angular-wise spatial objectness and temporal dynamics, without manual annotation. Secondly, a self-supervised training strategy, which learns the consistency of the predicted trajectories under different augment views, is proposed to enhance the planning robustness in steering scenarios. Our UAD achieves 38.7% relative improvements over UniAD on the average collision rate in nuScenes and surpasses VAD for 41.32 points on the driving score in CARLA's Town05 Long benchmark. Moreover, the proposed method only consumes 44.3% training resources of UniAD and runs 3.4 times faster in inference. Our innovative design not only for the first time demonstrates unarguable performance advantages over supervised counterparts, but also enjoys unprecedented efficiency in data, training, and inference. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/KargoBot_Research/UAD.

Ziying Song, Lei Yang, Shaoqing Xu et al.

Integrating LiDAR and camera information into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representation has emerged as a crucial aspect of 3D object detection in autonomous driving. However, existing methods are susceptible to the inaccurate calibration relationship between LiDAR and the camera sensor. Such inaccuracies result in errors in depth estimation for the camera branch, ultimately causing misalignment between LiDAR and camera BEV features. In this work, we propose a robust fusion framework called Graph BEV. Addressing errors caused by inaccurate point cloud projection, we introduce a Local Align module that employs neighbor-aware depth features via Graph matching. Additionally, we propose a Global Align module to rectify the misalignment between LiDAR and camera BEV features. Our Graph BEV framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an mAP of 70.1\%, surpassing BEV Fusion by 1.6\% on the nuscenes validation set. Importantly, our Graph BEV outperforms BEV Fusion by 8.3\% under conditions with misalignment noise.

Chuhao Liu, Ke Wang, Jieqi Shi et al.

Semantic mapping based on the supervised object detectors is sensitive to image distribution. In real-world environments, the object detection and segmentation performance can lead to a major drop, preventing the use of semantic mapping in a wider domain. On the other hand, the development of vision-language foundation models demonstrates a strong zero-shot transferability across data distribution. It provides an opportunity to construct generalizable instance-aware semantic maps. Hence, this work explores how to boost instance-aware semantic mapping from object detection generated from foundation models. We propose a probabilistic label fusion method to predict close-set semantic classes from open-set label measurements. An instance refinement module merges the over-segmented instances caused by inconsistent segmentation. We integrate all the modules into a unified semantic mapping system. Reading a sequence of RGB-D input, our work incrementally reconstructs an instance-aware semantic map. We evaluate the zero-shot performance of our method in ScanNet and SceneNN datasets. Our method achieves 40.3 mean average precision (mAP) on the ScanNet semantic instance segmentation task. It outperforms the traditional semantic mapping method significantly.

Jiamu Xu, Xiaoxiang Liu, Xinyuan Zhang et al.

Learning the discriminative features of different faces is an important task in face recognition. By extracting face features in neural networks, it becomes easy to measure the similarity of different face images, which makes face recognition possible. To enhance the neural network's face feature separability, incorporating an angular margin during training is common practice. State-of-the-art loss functions CosFace and ArcFace apply fixed margins between weights of classes to enhance the inter-class separation of face features. Since the distribution of samples in the training set is imbalanced, similarities between different identities are unequal. Therefore, using an inappropriately fixed angular margin may lead to the problem that the model is difficult to converge or the face features are not discriminative enough. It is more in line with our intuition that the margins are angular adaptive, which could increase with the angles between classes growing. In this paper, we propose a new angular margin loss named X2-Softmax. X2-Softmax loss has adaptive angular margins, which provide the margin that increases with the angle between different classes growing. The angular adaptive margin ensures model flexibility and effectively improves the effect of face recognition. We have trained the neural network with X2-Softmax loss on the MS1Mv3 dataset and tested it on several evaluation benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our loss function.

Hao Jiang, Chuan Hu, Yukang Shi et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer a promising approach to end-to-end autonomous driving due to their human-like reasoning capabilities. However, troublesome gaps remains between current VLMs and real-world autonomous driving applications. One major limitation is that existing datasets with loosely formatted language descriptions are not machine-friendly and may introduce redundancy. Additionally, high computational cost and massive scale of VLMs hinder the inference speed and real-world deployment. To bridge the gap, this paper introduces a structured and concise benchmark dataset, NuScenes-S, which is derived from the NuScenes dataset and contains machine-friendly structured representations. Moreover, we present FastDrive, a compact VLM baseline with 0.9B parameters. In contrast to existing VLMs with over 7B parameters and unstructured language processing(e.g., LLaVA-1.5), FastDrive understands structured and concise descriptions and generates machine-friendly driving decisions with high efficiency. Extensive experiments show that FastDrive achieves competitive performance on structured dataset, with approximately 20% accuracy improvement on decision-making tasks, while surpassing massive parameter baseline in inference speed with over 10x speedup. Additionally, ablation studies further focus on the impact of scene annotations (e.g., weather, time of day) on decision-making tasks, demonstrating their importance on decision-making tasks in autonomous driving.

Wenhao Jiang, Duo Li, Menghan Hu et al.

In the field of autonomous driving, end-to-end deep learning models show great potential by learning driving decisions directly from sensor data. However, training these models requires large amounts of labeled data, which is time-consuming and expensive. Considering that the real-world driving data exhibits a long-tailed distribution where simple scenarios constitute a majority part of the data, we are thus inspired to identify the most challenging scenarios within it. Subsequently, we can efficiently improve the performance of the model by training with the selected data of the highest value. Prior research has focused on the selection of valuable data by empirically designed strategies. However, manually designed methods suffer from being less generalizable to new data distributions. Observing that the BEV (Bird's Eye View) features in end-to-end models contain all the information required to represent the scenario, we propose an active learning framework that relies on these vectorized scene-level features, called SEAD. The framework selects initial data based on driving-environmental information and incremental data based on BEV features. Experiments show that we only need 30\% of the nuScenes training data to achieve performance close to what can be achieved with the full dataset. The source code will be released.

Shuhai Zhang, Jiahao Yang, Hui Luo et al.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial samples crafted by adding imperceptible perturbations to clean data, potentially leading to incorrect and dangerous predictions. Adversarial purification has been an effective means to improve DNNs robustness by removing these perturbations before feeding the data into the model. However, it faces significant challenges in preserving key structural and semantic information of data, as the imperceptible nature of adversarial perturbations makes it hard to avoid over-correcting, which can destroy important information and degrade model performance. In this paper, we break away from traditional adversarial purification methods by focusing on the clean data manifold. To this end, we reveal that samples generated by a well-trained generative model are close to clean ones but far from adversarial ones. Leveraging this insight, we propose Consistency Model-based Adversarial Purification (CMAP), which optimizes vectors within the latent space of a pre-trained consistency model to generate samples for restoring clean data. Specifically, 1) we propose a \textit{Perceptual consistency restoration} mechanism by minimizing the discrepancy between generated samples and input samples in both pixel and perceptual spaces. 2) To maintain the optimized latent vectors within the valid data manifold, we introduce a \textit{Latent distribution consistency constraint} strategy to align generated samples with the clean data distribution. 3) We also apply a \textit{Latent vector consistency prediction} scheme via an ensemble approach to enhance prediction reliability. CMAP fundamentally addresses adversarial perturbations at their source, providing a robust purification. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-100 show that our CMAP significantly enhances robustness against strong adversarial attacks while preserving high natural accuracy.

Shan Yang, Tanya Ambert, Zherong Pan et al.

Most recent garment capturing techniques rely on acquiring multiple views of clothing, which may not always be readily available, especially in the case of pre-existing photographs from the web. As an alternative, we pro- pose a method that is able to compute a rich and realistic 3D model of a human body and its outfits from a single photograph with little human in- teraction. Our algorithm is not only able to capture the global shape and geometry of the clothing, it can also extract small but important details of cloth, such as occluded wrinkles and folds. Unlike previous methods using full 3D information (i.e. depth, multi-view images, or sampled 3D geom- etry), our approach achieves detailed garment recovery from a single-view image by using statistical, geometric, and physical priors and a combina- tion of parameter estimation, semantic parsing, shape recovery, and physics- based cloth simulation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm by re-purposing the reconstructed garments for virtual try-on and garment transfer applications, as well as cloth animation for digital characters.