Maciej Woźniak

Maciej Wozniak, Jesper Ericsson, Hariprasath Govindarajan et al.

Leveraging Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for camera-to-LiDAR knowledge distillation offers a promising solution to the scarcity of annotated data needed to represent the immense geometric and kinematic diversity of real-world autonomous driving (AD). However, current approaches typically treat VFMs as black-box teachers, relying exclusively on frame-wise feature similarity. Consequently, they do not fully exploit the teacher's layer-wise semantic structure and global context, as well as the rich spatiotemporal information inherent in LiDAR sequences. We propose HilDA, a self-supervised pretraining framework for LiDAR backbones that better captures the semantic what and geometric where needed for driving tasks. HilDA combines hierarchical distillation comprising multi-layer distillation for progressive semantic alignment and global context distillation for scene-level semantics, with a temporal occupancy diffusion objective promoting spatiotemporal consistency. Models pre-trained with HilDA achieve state-of-the-art results on cross-modal distillation benchmarks and outperform models trained via prior distillation approaches on 3D object detection, scene flow, and semantic occupancy prediction. Code available at: https://maxiuw.github.io/hilda.

Juliusz Wasieleski, Tomasz Służalec, Maciej Woźniak et al.

We develop a wildfire simulation model that evolves the temperature scalar field using an energy balance equation accounting for heat generation, transport, and loss. For these equations, we develop quasi-implicit time integration schemes using direction splitting of the differential operators. We use the Peaceman-Rachford and Strang splitting methods, including the Crank-Nicolson method. Based on these discretizations, we derive variational formulations and explore the Kronecker product structure of the matrices. In the wildfire model, there are some non-linear terms that we treat explicitly. We perform a detailed analysis of how treating these terms affects the stability of the time integration scheme. Namely, we show that a quasi-implicit time integration scheme achieves 10 times higher simulation accuracy. We present two wildfire simulations. The first is a simulation of the 2024 wildfire disaster in the Valparaíso region of Chile. The second one is a simulation of the 2019 wildfire disaster in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. We discuss the numerical results and compare them against satellite images and measurement records. We also present a numerical experiment for comparison with the state-of-the-art wildfire simulation model FARSITE. Our sequential code has a linear computational cost of ${\cal O}(N)$. We also present the parallel scalability of the WILDFIRE-IGA-ADS code to illustrate the possibility of running the code on a local workstation.