Yupeng Zheng

Bu Jin, Xinyu Liu, Yupeng Zheng et al.

End-to-end autonomous driving has great potential in the transportation industry. However, the lack of transparency and interpretability of the automatic decision-making process hinders its industrial adoption in practice. There have been some early attempts to use attention maps or cost volume for better model explainability which is difficult for ordinary passengers to understand. To bridge the gap, we propose an end-to-end transformer-based architecture, ADAPT (Action-aware Driving cAPtion Transformer), which provides user-friendly natural language narrations and reasoning for each decision making step of autonomous vehicular control and action. ADAPT jointly trains both the driving caption task and the vehicular control prediction task, through a shared video representation. Experiments on BDD-X (Berkeley DeepDrive eXplanation) dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of the ADAPT framework on both automatic metrics and human evaluation. To illustrate the feasibility of the proposed framework in real-world applications, we build a novel deployable system that takes raw car videos as input and outputs the action narrations and reasoning in real time. The code, models and data are available at https://github.com/jxbbb/ADAPT.

Chengliang Zhong, Yuhang Zheng, Yupeng Zheng et al.

Keypoint-based representation has proven advantageous in various visual and robotic tasks. However, the existing 2D and 3D methods for detecting keypoints mainly rely on geometric consistency to achieve spatial alignment, neglecting temporal consistency. To address this issue, the Transporter method was introduced for 2D data, which reconstructs the target frame from the source frame to incorporate both spatial and temporal information. However, the direct application of the Transporter to 3D point clouds is infeasible due to their structural differences from 2D images. Thus, we propose the first 3D version of the Transporter, which leverages hybrid 3D representation, cross attention, and implicit reconstruction. We apply this new learning system on 3D articulated objects and nonrigid animals (humans and rodents) and show that learned keypoints are spatio-temporally consistent. Additionally, we propose a closed-loop control strategy that utilizes the learned keypoints for 3D object manipulation and demonstrate its superior performance. Codes are available at https://github.com/zhongcl-thu/3D-Implicit-Transporter.

Yupeng Zheng, Chengliang Zhong, Pengfei Li et al.

Self-supervised depth estimation draws a lot of attention recently as it can promote the 3D sensing capabilities of self-driving vehicles. However, it intrinsically relies upon the photometric consistency assumption, which hardly holds during nighttime. Although various supervised nighttime image enhancement methods have been proposed, their generalization performance in challenging driving scenarios is not satisfactory. To this end, we propose the first method that jointly learns a nighttime image enhancer and a depth estimator, without using ground truth for either task. Our method tightly entangles two self-supervised tasks using a newly proposed uncertain pixel masking strategy. This strategy originates from the observation that nighttime images not only suffer from underexposed regions but also from overexposed regions. By fitting a bridge-shaped curve to the illumination map distribution, both regions are suppressed and two tasks are bridged naturally. We benchmark the method on two established datasets: nuScenes and RobotCar and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on both of them. Detailed ablations also reveal the mechanism of our proposal. Last but not least, to mitigate the problem of sparse ground truth of existing datasets, we provide a new photo-realistically enhanced nighttime dataset based upon CARLA. It brings meaningful new challenges to the community. Codes, data, and models are available at https://github.com/ucaszyp/STEPS.

Zhiqiang Yan, Yupeng Zheng, Chongyi Li et al.

Depth completion is the task of recovering dense depth maps from sparse ones, usually with the help of color images. Existing image-guided methods perform well on daytime depth perception self-driving benchmarks, but struggle in nighttime scenarios with poor visibility and complex illumination. To address these challenges, we propose a simple yet effective framework called LDCNet. Our key idea is to use Recurrent Inter-Convolution Differencing (RICD) and Illumination-Affinitive Intra-Convolution Differencing (IAICD) to enhance the nighttime color images and reduce the negative effects of the varying illumination, respectively. RICD explicitly estimates global illumination by differencing two convolutions with different kernels, treating the small-kernel-convolution feature as the center of the large-kernel-convolution feature in a new perspective. IAICD softly alleviates local relative light intensity by differencing a single convolution, where the center is dynamically aggregated based on neighboring pixels and the estimated illumination map in RICD. On both nighttime depth completion and depth estimation tasks, extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our LDCNet, reaching the state of the art.

Xiaoxue Chen, Yuhang Zheng, Yupeng Zheng et al.

Nowadays, many visual scene understanding problems are addressed by dense prediction networks. But pixel-wise dense annotations are very expensive (e.g., for scene parsing) or impossible (e.g., for intrinsic image decomposition), motivating us to leverage cheap point-level weak supervision. However, existing pointly-supervised methods still use the same architecture designed for full supervision. In stark contrast to them, we propose a new paradigm that makes predictions for point coordinate queries, as inspired by the recent success of implicit representations, like distance or radiance fields. As such, the method is named as dense prediction fields (DPFs). DPFs generate expressive intermediate features for continuous sub-pixel locations, thus allowing outputs of an arbitrary resolution. DPFs are naturally compatible with point-level supervision. We showcase the effectiveness of DPFs using two substantially different tasks: high-level semantic parsing and low-level intrinsic image decomposition. In these two cases, supervision comes in the form of single-point semantic category and two-point relative reflectance, respectively. As benchmarked by three large-scale public datasets PASCALContext, ADE20K and IIW, DPFs set new state-of-the-art performance on all of them with significant margins. Code can be accessed at https://github.com/cxx226/DPF.

Yupeng Zheng, Xiang Li, Pengfei Li et al. · tsinghua

Monocular Semantic Occupancy Prediction aims to infer the complete 3D geometry and semantic information of scenes from only 2D images. It has garnered significant attention, particularly due to its potential to enhance the 3D perception of autonomous vehicles. However, existing methods rely on a complex cascaded framework with relatively limited information to restore 3D scenes, including a dependency on supervision solely on the whole network's output, single-frame input, and the utilization of a small backbone. These challenges, in turn, hinder the optimization of the framework and yield inferior prediction results, particularly concerning smaller and long-tailed objects. To address these issues, we propose MonoOcc. In particular, we (i) improve the monocular occupancy prediction framework by proposing an auxiliary semantic loss as supervision to the shallow layers of the framework and an image-conditioned cross-attention module to refine voxel features with visual clues, and (ii) employ a distillation module that transfers temporal information and richer knowledge from a larger image backbone to the monocular semantic occupancy prediction framework with low cost of hardware. With these advantages, our method yields state-of-the-art performance on the camera-based SemanticKITTI Scene Completion benchmark. Codes and models can be accessed at https://github.com/ucaszyp/MonoOcc

Bu Jin, Yupeng Zheng, Pengfei Li et al.

3D dense captioning stands as a cornerstone in achieving a comprehensive understanding of 3D scenes through natural language. It has recently witnessed remarkable achievements, particularly in indoor settings. However, the exploration of 3D dense captioning in outdoor scenes is hindered by two major challenges: 1) the domain gap between indoor and outdoor scenes, such as dynamics and sparse visual inputs, makes it difficult to directly adapt existing indoor methods; 2) the lack of data with comprehensive box-caption pair annotations specifically tailored for outdoor scenes. To this end, we introduce the new task of outdoor 3D dense captioning. As input, we assume a LiDAR point cloud and a set of RGB images captured by the panoramic camera rig. The expected output is a set of object boxes with captions. To tackle this task, we propose the TOD3Cap network, which leverages the BEV representation to generate object box proposals and integrates Relation Q-Former with LLaMA-Adapter to generate rich captions for these objects. We also introduce the TOD3Cap dataset, the largest one to our knowledge for 3D dense captioning in outdoor scenes, which contains 2.3M descriptions of 64.3K outdoor objects from 850 scenes. Notably, our TOD3Cap network can effectively localize and caption 3D objects in outdoor scenes, which outperforms baseline methods by a significant margin (+9.6 CiDEr@0.5IoU). Code, data, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/jxbbb/TOD3Cap.

Yupeng Zheng, Pengxuan Yang, Zebin Xing et al.

End-to-end autonomous driving directly generates planning trajectories from raw sensor data, yet it typically relies on costly perception supervision to extract scene information. A critical research challenge arises: constructing an informative driving world model to enable perception annotation-free, end-to-end planning via self-supervised learning. In this paper, we present World4Drive, an end-to-end autonomous driving framework that employs vision foundation models to build latent world models for generating and evaluating multi-modal planning trajectories. Specifically, World4Drive first extracts scene features, including driving intention and world latent representations enriched with spatial-semantic priors provided by vision foundation models. It then generates multi-modal planning trajectories based on current scene features and driving intentions and predicts multiple intention-driven future states within the latent space. Finally, it introduces a world model selector module to evaluate and select the best trajectory. We achieve perception annotation-free, end-to-end planning through self-supervised alignment between actual future observations and predicted observations reconstructed from the latent space. World4Drive achieves state-of-the-art performance without manual perception annotations on both the open-loop nuScenes and closed-loop NavSim benchmarks, demonstrating an 18.1\% relative reduction in L2 error, 46.7% lower collision rate, and 3.75 faster training convergence. Codes will be accessed at https://github.com/ucaszyp/World4Drive.

Pengxuan Yang, Yupeng Zheng, Qichao Zhang et al.

End-to-end autonomous driving aims to produce planning trajectories from raw sensors directly. Currently, most approaches integrate perception, prediction, and planning modules into a fully differentiable network, promising great scalability. However, these methods typically rely on deterministic modeling of online maps in the perception module for guiding or constraining vehicle planning, which may incorporate erroneous perception information and further compromise planning safety. To address this issue, we delve into the importance of online map uncertainty for enhancing autonomous driving safety and propose a novel paradigm named UncAD. Specifically, UncAD first estimates the uncertainty of the online map in the perception module. It then leverages the uncertainty to guide motion prediction and planning modules to produce multi-modal trajectories. Finally, to achieve safer autonomous driving, UncAD proposes an uncertainty-collision-aware planning selection strategy according to the online map uncertainty to evaluate and select the best trajectory. In this study, we incorporate UncAD into various state-of-the-art (SOTA) end-to-end methods. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset show that integrating UncAD, with only a 1.9% increase in parameters, can reduce collision rates by up to 26% and drivable area conflict rate by up to 42%. Codes, pre-trained models, and demo videos can be accessed at https://github.com/pengxuanyang/UncAD.

Yuhang Zheng, Xiangyu Chen, Yupeng Zheng et al.

Constructing a 3D scene capable of accommodating open-ended language queries, is a pivotal pursuit, particularly within the domain of robotics. Such technology facilitates robots in executing object manipulations based on human language directives. To tackle this challenge, some research efforts have been dedicated to the development of language-embedded implicit fields. However, implicit fields (e.g. NeRF) encounter limitations due to the necessity of processing a large number of input views for reconstruction, coupled with their inherent inefficiencies in inference. Thus, we present the GaussianGrasper, which utilizes 3D Gaussian Splatting to explicitly represent the scene as a collection of Gaussian primitives. Our approach takes a limited set of RGB-D views and employs a tile-based splatting technique to create a feature field. In particular, we propose an Efficient Feature Distillation (EFD) module that employs contrastive learning to efficiently and accurately distill language embeddings derived from foundational models. With the reconstructed geometry of the Gaussian field, our method enables the pre-trained grasping model to generate collision-free grasp pose candidates. Furthermore, we propose a normal-guided grasp module to select the best grasp pose. Through comprehensive real-world experiments, we demonstrate that GaussianGrasper enables robots to accurately query and grasp objects with language instructions, providing a new solution for language-guided manipulation tasks. Data and codes can be available at https://github.com/MrSecant/GaussianGrasper.

Zhiqiang Yan, Yuankai Lin, Kun Wang et al.

Depth completion is a vital task for autonomous driving, as it involves reconstructing the precise 3D geometry of a scene from sparse and noisy depth measurements. However, most existing methods either rely only on 2D depth representations or directly incorporate raw 3D point clouds for compensation, which are still insufficient to capture the fine-grained 3D geometry of the scene. To address this challenge, we introduce Tri-Perspective view Decomposition (TPVD), a novel framework that can explicitly model 3D geometry. In particular, (1) TPVD ingeniously decomposes the original point cloud into three 2D views, one of which corresponds to the sparse depth input. (2) We design TPV Fusion to update the 2D TPV features through recurrent 2D-3D-2D aggregation, where a Distance-Aware Spherical Convolution (DASC) is applied. (3) By adaptively choosing TPV affinitive neighbors, the newly proposed Geometric Spatial Propagation Network (GSPN) further improves the geometric consistency. As a result, our TPVD outperforms existing methods on KITTI, NYUv2, and SUN RGBD. Furthermore, we build a novel depth completion dataset named TOFDC, which is acquired by the time-of-flight (TOF) sensor and the color camera on smartphones. Project page: https://yanzq95.github.io/projectpage/TOFDC/index.html

Xiaoxiao Long, Yuhang Zheng, Yupeng Zheng et al.

We introduce a novel approach to learn geometries such as depth and surface normal from images while incorporating geometric context. The difficulty of reliably capturing geometric context in existing methods impedes their ability to accurately enforce the consistency between the different geometric properties, thereby leading to a bottleneck of geometric estimation quality. We therefore propose the Adaptive Surface Normal (ASN) constraint, a simple yet efficient method. Our approach extracts geometric context that encodes the geometric variations present in the input image and correlates depth estimation with geometric constraints. By dynamically determining reliable local geometry from randomly sampled candidates, we establish a surface normal constraint, where the validity of these candidates is evaluated using the geometric context. Furthermore, our normal estimation leverages the geometric context to prioritize regions that exhibit significant geometric variations, which makes the predicted normals accurately capture intricate and detailed geometric information. Through the integration of geometric context, our method unifies depth and surface normal estimations within a cohesive framework, which enables the generation of high-quality 3D geometry from images. We validate the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art methods through extensive evaluations and comparisons on diverse indoor and outdoor datasets, showcasing its efficiency and robustness.

Beiwen Tian, Huan-ang Gao, Leiyao Cui et al.

In the past several years, road anomaly segmentation is actively explored in the academia and drawing growing attention in the industry. The rationale behind is straightforward: if the autonomous car can brake before hitting an anomalous object, safety is promoted. However, this rationale naturally calls for a temporally informed setting while existing methods and benchmarks are designed in an unrealistic frame-wise manner. To bridge this gap, we contribute the first video anomaly segmentation dataset for autonomous driving. Since placing various anomalous objects on busy roads and annotating them in every frame are dangerous and expensive, we resort to synthetic data. To improve the relevance of this synthetic dataset to real-world applications, we train a generative adversarial network conditioned on rendering G-buffers for photorealism enhancement. Our dataset consists of 120,000 high-resolution frames at a 60 FPS framerate, as recorded in 7 different towns. As an initial benchmarking, we provide baselines using latest supervised and unsupervised road anomaly segmentation methods. Apart from conventional ones, we focus on two new metrics: temporal consistency and latencyaware streaming accuracy. We believe the latter is valuable as it measures whether an anomaly segmentation algorithm can truly prevent a car from crashing in a temporally informed setting.

Zhennan Jiang, Kai Liu, Yuxin Qin et al.

Robotic manipulation policies are commonly initialized through imitation learning, but their performance is limited by the scarcity and narrow coverage of expert data. Reinforcement learning can refine polices to alleviate this limitation, yet real-robot training is costly and unsafe, while training in simulators suffers from the sim-to-real gap. Recent advances in generative models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in real-world simulation, with diffusion models in particular excelling at generation. This raises the question of how diffusion model-based world models can be combined to enhance pre-trained policies in robotic manipulation. In this work, we propose World4RL, a framework that employs diffusion-based world models as high-fidelity simulators to refine pre-trained policies entirely in imagined environments for robotic manipulation. Unlike prior works that primarily employ world models for planning, our framework enables direct end-to-end policy optimization. World4RL is designed around two principles: pre-training a diffusion world model that captures diverse dynamics on multi-task datasets and refining policies entirely within a frozen world model to avoid online real-world interactions. We further design a two-hot action encoding scheme tailored for robotic manipulation and adopt diffusion backbones to improve modeling fidelity. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that World4RL provides high-fidelity environment modeling and enables consistent policy refinement, yielding significantly higher success rates compared to imitation learning and other baselines. More visualization results are available at https://world4rl.github.io/.