Senna: Bridging Large Vision-Language Models and End-to-End Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving demonstrates strong planning capabilities with large-scale data but still struggles in complex, rare scenarios due to limited commonsense. In contrast, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) excel in scene understanding and reasoning. The path forward lies in merging the strengths of both approaches. Previous methods using LVLMs to predict trajectories or control signals yield suboptimal results, as LVLMs are not well-suited for precise numerical predictions. This paper presents Senna, an autonomous driving system combining an LVLM (Senna-VLM) with an end-to-end model (Senna-E2E). Senna decouples high-level planning from low-level trajectory prediction. Senna-VLM generates planning decisions in natural language, while Senna-E2E predicts precise trajectories. Senna-VLM utilizes a multi-image encoding approach and multi-view prompts for efficient scene understanding. Besides, we introduce planning-oriented QAs alongside a three-stage training strategy, which enhances Senna-VLM's planning performance while preserving commonsense. Extensive experiments on two datasets show that Senna achieves state-of-the-art planning performance. Notably, with pre-training on a large-scale dataset DriveX and fine-tuning on nuScenes, Senna significantly reduces average planning error by 27.12% and collision rate by 33.33% over model without pre-training. We believe Senna's cross-scenario generalization and transferability are essential for achieving fully autonomous driving. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/hustvl/Senna.

ViG: Linear-complexity Visual Sequence Learning with Gated Linear Attention

Recently, linear complexity sequence modeling networks have achieved modeling capabilities similar to Vision Transformers on a variety of computer vision tasks, while using fewer FLOPs and less memory. However, their advantage in terms of actual runtime speed is not significant. To address this issue, we introduce Gated Linear Attention (GLA) for vision, leveraging its superior hardware-awareness and efficiency. We propose direction-wise gating to capture 1D global context through bidirectional modeling and a 2D gating locality injection to adaptively inject 2D local details into 1D global context. Our hardware-aware implementation further merges forward and backward scanning into a single kernel, enhancing parallelism and reducing memory cost and latency. The proposed model, ViG, offers a favorable trade-off in accuracy, parameters, and FLOPs on ImageNet and downstream tasks, outperforming popular Transformer and CNN-based models. Notably, ViG-S matches DeiT-B's accuracy while using only 27% of the parameters and 20% of the FLOPs, running 2$\times$ faster on $224\times224$ images. At $1024\times1024$ resolution, ViG-T uses 5.2$\times$ fewer FLOPs, saves 90% GPU memory, runs 4.8$\times$ faster, and achieves 20.7% higher top-1 accuracy than DeiT-T. These results position ViG as an efficient and scalable solution for visual representation learning. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/hustvl/ViG}.

DiG: Scalable and Efficient Diffusion Models with Gated Linear Attention

Diffusion models with large-scale pre-training have achieved significant success in the field of visual content generation, particularly exemplified by Diffusion Transformers (DiT). However, DiT models have faced challenges with scalability and quadratic complexity efficiency. In this paper, we aim to leverage the long sequence modeling capability of Gated Linear Attention (GLA) Transformers, expanding its applicability to diffusion models. We introduce Diffusion Gated Linear Attention Transformers (DiG), a simple, adoptable solution with minimal parameter overhead, following the DiT design, but offering superior efficiency and effectiveness. In addition to better performance than DiT, DiG-S/2 exhibits $2.5\times$ higher training speed than DiT-S/2 and saves $75.7\%$ GPU memory at a resolution of $1792 \times 1792$. Moreover, we analyze the scalability of DiG across a variety of computational complexity. DiG models, with increased depth/width or augmentation of input tokens, consistently exhibit decreasing FID. We further compare DiG with other subquadratic-time diffusion models. With the same model size, DiG-XL/2 is $4.2\times$ faster than the recent Mamba-based diffusion model at a $1024$ resolution, and is $1.8\times$ faster than DiT with CUDA-optimized FlashAttention-2 under the $2048$ resolution. All these results demonstrate its superior efficiency among the latest diffusion models. Code is released at https://github.com/hustvl/DiG.

MIM4D: Masked Modeling with Multi-View Video for Autonomous Driving Representation Learning

Learning robust and scalable visual representations from massive multi-view video data remains a challenge in computer vision and autonomous driving. Existing pre-training methods either rely on expensive supervised learning with 3D annotations, limiting the scalability, or focus on single-frame or monocular inputs, neglecting the temporal information. We propose MIM4D, a novel pre-training paradigm based on dual masked image modeling (MIM). MIM4D leverages both spatial and temporal relations by training on masked multi-view video inputs. It constructs pseudo-3D features using continuous scene flow and projects them onto 2D plane for supervision. To address the lack of dense 3D supervision, MIM4D reconstruct pixels by employing 3D volumetric differentiable rendering to learn geometric representations. We demonstrate that MIM4D achieves state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes dataset for visual representation learning in autonomous driving. It significantly improves existing methods on multiple downstream tasks, including BEV segmentation (8.7% IoU), 3D object detection (3.5% mAP), and HD map construction (1.4% mAP). Our work offers a new choice for learning representation at scale in autonomous driving. Code and models are released at https://github.com/hustvl/MIM4D

VADv2: End-to-End Vectorized Autonomous Driving via Probabilistic Planning

Learning a human-like driving policy from large-scale driving demonstrations is promising, but the uncertainty and non-deterministic nature of planning make it challenging. In this work, to cope with the uncertainty problem, we propose VADv2, an end-to-end driving model based on probabilistic planning. VADv2 takes multi-view image sequences as input in a streaming manner, transforms sensor data into environmental token embeddings, outputs the probabilistic distribution of action, and samples one action to control the vehicle. Only with camera sensors, VADv2 achieves state-of-the-art closed-loop performance on the CARLA Town05 benchmark, significantly outperforming all existing methods. It runs stably in a fully end-to-end manner, even without the rule-based wrapper. Closed-loop demos are presented at https://hgao-cv.github.io/VADv2.

Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model

Recently the state space models (SSMs) with efficient hardware-aware designs, i.e., Mamba, have shown great potential for long sequence modeling. Building efficient and generic vision backbones purely upon SSMs is an appealing direction. However, representing visual data is challenging for SSMs due to the position-sensitivity of visual data and the requirement of global context for visual understanding. In this paper, we show that the reliance of visual representation learning on self-attention is not necessary and propose a new generic vision backbone with bidirectional Mamba blocks (Vim), which marks the image sequences with position embeddings and compresses the visual representation with bidirectional state space models. On ImageNet classification, COCO object detection, and ADE20k semantic segmentation tasks, Vim achieves higher performance compared to well-established vision transformers like DeiT, while also demonstrating significantly improved computation & memory efficiency. For example, Vim is 2.8$\times$ faster than DeiT and saves 86.8% GPU memory when performing batch inference to extract features on images with a resolution of 1248$\times$1248. The results demonstrate that Vim is capable of overcoming the computation & memory constraints on performing Transformer-style understanding for high-resolution images and it has great potential to become the next-generation backbone for vision foundation models. Code is available at https://github.com/hustvl/Vim.

MapTRv2: An End-to-End Framework for Online Vectorized HD Map Construction

High-definition (HD) map provides abundant and precise static environmental information of the driving scene, serving as a fundamental and indispensable component for planning in autonomous driving system. In this paper, we present \textbf{Map} \textbf{TR}ansformer, an end-to-end framework for online vectorized HD map construction. We propose a unified permutation-equivalent modeling approach, \ie, modeling map element as a point set with a group of equivalent permutations, which accurately describes the shape of map element and stabilizes the learning process. We design a hierarchical query embedding scheme to flexibly encode structured map information and perform hierarchical bipartite matching for map element learning. To speed up convergence, we further introduce auxiliary one-to-many matching and dense supervision. The proposed method well copes with various map elements with arbitrary shapes. It runs at real-time inference speed and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both nuScenes and Argoverse2 datasets. Abundant qualitative results show stable and robust map construction quality in complex and various driving scenes. Code and more demos are available at \url{https://github.com/hustvl/MapTR} for facilitating further studies and applications.

VMA: Divide-and-Conquer Vectorized Map Annotation System for Large-Scale Driving Scene

High-definition (HD) map serves as the essential infrastructure of autonomous driving. In this work, we build up a systematic vectorized map annotation framework (termed VMA) for efficiently generating HD map of large-scale driving scene. We design a divide-and-conquer annotation scheme to solve the spatial extensibility problem of HD map generation, and abstract map elements with a variety of geometric patterns as unified point sequence representation, which can be extended to most map elements in the driving scene. VMA is highly efficient and extensible, requiring negligible human effort, and flexible in terms of spatial scale and element type. We quantitatively and qualitatively validate the annotation performance on real-world urban and highway scenes, as well as NYC Planimetric Database. VMA can significantly improve map generation efficiency and require little human effort. On average VMA takes 160min for annotating a scene with a range of hundreds of meters, and reduces 52.3% of the human cost, showing great application value.

VAD: Vectorized Scene Representation for Efficient Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving requires a comprehensive understanding of the surrounding environment for reliable trajectory planning. Previous works rely on dense rasterized scene representation (e.g., agent occupancy and semantic map) to perform planning, which is computationally intensive and misses the instance-level structure information. In this paper, we propose VAD, an end-to-end vectorized paradigm for autonomous driving, which models the driving scene as fully vectorized representation. The proposed vectorized paradigm has two significant advantages. On one hand, VAD exploits the vectorized agent motion and map elements as explicit instance-level planning constraints which effectively improves planning safety. On the other hand, VAD runs much faster than previous end-to-end planning methods by getting rid of computation-intensive rasterized representation and hand-designed post-processing steps. VAD achieves state-of-the-art end-to-end planning performance on the nuScenes dataset, outperforming the previous best method by a large margin (reducing the average collision rate by 48.4%). Besides, VAD greatly improves the inference speed (up to 9.3x), which is critical for the real-world deployment of an autonomous driving system. Code and models will be released for facilitating future research.

Lane Graph as Path: Continuity-preserving Path-wise Modeling for Online Lane Graph Construction

Online lane graph construction is a promising but challenging task in autonomous driving. Previous methods usually model the lane graph at the pixel or piece level, and recover the lane graph by pixel-wise or piece-wise connection, which breaks down the continuity of the lane. Human drivers focus on and drive along the continuous and complete paths instead of considering lane pieces. Autonomous vehicles also require path-specific guidance from lane graph for trajectory planning. We argue that the path, which indicates the traffic flow, is the primitive of the lane graph. Motivated by this, we propose to model the lane graph in a novel path-wise manner, which well preserves the continuity of the lane and encodes traffic information for planning. We present a path-based online lane graph construction method, termed LaneGAP, which end-to-end learns the path and recovers the lane graph via a Path2Graph algorithm. We qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the superiority of LaneGAP over conventional pixel-based and piece-based methods. Abundant visualizations show LaneGAP can cope with diverse traffic conditions. Code and models will be released at \url{https://github.com/hustvl/LaneGAP} for facilitating future research.