NOVA: Next-step Open-Vocabulary Autoregression for 3D Multi-Object Tracking in Autonomous Driving
This addresses the challenge of open-world perception for autonomous vehicles by enabling tracking of unknown objects, representing a novel paradigm shift rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackled the problem of 3D multi-object tracking in autonomous driving by proposing NOVA, a method that uses autoregressive modeling with large language models to generalize across unknown targets, achieving a 20.21% absolute improvement in AMOTA for novel categories on the nuScenes dataset.
Generalizing across unknown targets is critical for open-world perception, yet existing 3D Multi-Object Tracking (3D MOT) pipelines remain limited by closed-set assumptions and ``semantic-blind'' heuristics. To address this, we propose Next-step Open-Vocabulary Autoregression (NOVA), an innovative paradigm that shifts 3D tracking from traditional fragmented distance-based matching toward generative spatio-temporal semantic modeling. NOVA reformulates 3D trajectories as structured spatio-temporal semantic sequences, enabling the simultaneous encoding of physical motion continuity and deep linguistic priors. By leveraging the autoregressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we transform the tracking task into a principled process of next-step sequence completion. This mechanism allows the model to explicitly utilize the hierarchical structure of language space to resolve fine-grained semantic ambiguities and maintain identity consistency across complex long-range sequences through high-level commonsense reasoning. Extensive experiments on nuScenes, V2X-Seq-SPD, and KITTI demonstrate the superior performance of NOVA. Notably, on the nuScenes dataset, NOVA achieves an AMOTA of 22.41% for Novel categories, yielding a significant 20.21% absolute improvement over the baseline. These gains are realized through a compact 0.5B autoregressive model. Code will be available at https://github.com/xifen523/NOVA.