Embodied Scene Understanding for Vision Language Models via MetaVQA

Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate significant potential as embodied AI agents for various mobility applications. However, a standardized, closed-loop benchmark for evaluating their spatial reasoning and sequential decision-making capabilities is lacking. To address this, we present MetaVQA: a comprehensive benchmark designed to assess and enhance VLMs' understanding of spatial relationships and scene dynamics through Visual Question Answering (VQA) and closed-loop simulations. MetaVQA leverages Set-of-Mark prompting and top-down view ground-truth annotations from nuScenes and Waymo datasets to automatically generate extensive question-answer pairs based on diverse real-world traffic scenarios, ensuring object-centric and context-rich instructions. Our experiments show that fine-tuning VLMs with the MetaVQA dataset significantly improves their spatial reasoning and embodied scene comprehension in safety-critical simulations, evident not only in improved VQA accuracies but also in emerging safety-aware driving maneuvers. In addition, the learning demonstrates strong transferability from simulation to real-world observation. Code and data will be publicly available at https://metadriverse.github.io/metavqa .

Vid2Sim: Realistic and Interactive Simulation from Video for Urban Navigation

Sim-to-real gap has long posed a significant challenge for robot learning in simulation, preventing the deployment of learned models in the real world. Previous work has primarily focused on domain randomization and system identification to mitigate this gap. However, these methods are often limited by the inherent constraints of the simulation and graphics engines. In this work, we propose Vid2Sim, a novel framework that effectively bridges the sim2real gap through a scalable and cost-efficient real2sim pipeline for neural 3D scene reconstruction and simulation. Given a monocular video as input, Vid2Sim can generate photorealistic and physically interactable 3D simulation environments to enable the reinforcement learning of visual navigation agents in complex urban environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Vid2Sim significantly improves the performance of urban navigation in the digital twins and real world by 31.2% and 68.3% in success rate compared with agents trained with prior simulation methods.

Joint Optimization for 4D Human-Scene Reconstruction in the Wild

Reconstructing human motion and its surrounding environment is crucial for understanding human-scene interaction and predicting human movements in the scene. While much progress has been made in capturing human-scene interaction in constrained environments, those prior methods can hardly reconstruct the natural and diverse human motion and scene context from web videos. In this work, we propose JOSH, a novel optimization-based method for 4D human-scene reconstruction in the wild from monocular videos. JOSH uses techniques in both dense scene reconstruction and human mesh recovery as initialization, and then it leverages the human-scene contact constraints to jointly optimize the scene, the camera poses, and the human motion. Experiment results show JOSH achieves better results on both global human motion estimation and dense scene reconstruction by joint optimization of scene geometry and human motion. We further design a more efficient model, JOSH3R, and directly train it with pseudo-labels from web videos. JOSH3R outperforms other optimization-free methods by only training with labels predicted from JOSH, further demonstrating its accuracy and generalization ability.

Hyper: Hyperparameter Robust Efficient Exploration in Reinforcement Learning

The exploration \& exploitation dilemma poses significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, curiosity-based exploration methods achieved great success in tackling hard-exploration problems. However, they necessitate extensive hyperparameter tuning on different environments, which heavily limits the applicability and accessibility of this line of methods. In this paper, we characterize this problem via analysis of the agent behavior, concluding the fundamental difficulty of choosing a proper hyperparameter. We then identify the difficulty and the instability of the optimization when the agent learns with curiosity. We propose our method, hyperparameter robust exploration (\textbf{Hyper}), which extensively mitigates the problem by effectively regularizing the visitation of the exploration and decoupling the exploitation to ensure stable training. We theoretically justify that \textbf{Hyper} is provably efficient under function approximation setting and empirically demonstrate its appealing performance and robustness in various environments.

V2XPnP: Vehicle-to-Everything Spatio-Temporal Fusion for Multi-Agent Perception and Prediction

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technologies offer a promising paradigm to mitigate the limitations of constrained observability in single-vehicle systems. Prior work primarily focuses on single-frame cooperative perception, which fuses agents' information across different spatial locations but ignores temporal cues and temporal tasks (e.g., temporal perception and prediction). In this paper, we focus on temporal perception and prediction tasks in V2X scenarios and design one-step and multi-step communication strategies (when to transmit) as well as examine their integration with three fusion strategies - early, late, and intermediate (what to transmit), providing comprehensive benchmarks with various fusion models (how to fuse). Furthermore, we propose V2XPnP, a novel intermediate fusion framework within one-step communication for end-to-end perception and prediction. Our framework employs a unified Transformer-based architecture to effectively model complex spatiotemporal relationships across temporal per-frame, spatial per-agent, and high-definition map. Moreover, we introduce the V2XPnP Sequential Dataset that supports all V2X cooperation modes and addresses the limitations of existing real-world datasets, which are restricted to single-frame or single-mode cooperation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both perception and prediction tasks.

Verbalized Representation Learning for Interpretable Few-Shot Generalization

Humans recognize objects after observing only a few examples, a remarkable capability enabled by their inherent language understanding of the real-world environment. Developing verbalized and interpretable representation can significantly improve model generalization in low-data settings. In this work, we propose Verbalized Representation Learning (VRL), a novel approach for automatically extracting human-interpretable features for object recognition using few-shot data. Our method uniquely captures inter-class differences and intra-class commonalities in the form of natural language by employing a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to identify key discriminative features between different classes and shared characteristics within the same class. These verbalized features are then mapped to numeric vectors through the VLM. The resulting feature vectors can be further utilized to train and infer with downstream classifiers. Experimental results show that, at the same model scale, VRL achieves a 24% absolute improvement over prior state-of-the-art methods while using 95% less data and a smaller mode. Furthermore, compared to human-labeled attributes, the features learned by VRL exhibit a 20% absolute gain when used for downstream classification tasks. Code is available at: https://github.com/joeyy5588/VRL/tree/main.

Learning to Generate Diverse Pedestrian Movements from Web Videos with Noisy Labels

Understanding and modeling pedestrian movements in the real world is crucial for applications like motion forecasting and scene simulation. Many factors influence pedestrian movements, such as scene context, individual characteristics, and goals, which are often ignored by the existing human generation methods. Web videos contain natural pedestrian behavior and rich motion context, but annotating them with pre-trained predictors leads to noisy labels. In this work, we propose learning diverse pedestrian movements from web videos. We first curate a large-scale dataset called CityWalkers that captures diverse real-world pedestrian movements in urban scenes. Then, based on CityWalkers, we propose a generative model called PedGen for diverse pedestrian movement generation. PedGen introduces automatic label filtering to remove the low-quality labels and a mask embedding to train with partial labels. It also contains a novel context encoder that lifts the 2D scene context to 3D and can incorporate various context factors in generating realistic pedestrian movements in urban scenes. Experiments show that PedGen outperforms existing baseline methods for pedestrian movement generation by learning from noisy labels and incorporating the context factors. In addition, PedGen achieves zero-shot generalization in both real-world and simulated environments. The code, model, and data will be made publicly available at https://genforce.github.io/PedGen/ .

CooPre: Cooperative Pretraining for V2X Cooperative Perception

Existing Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) cooperative perception methods rely on accurate multi-agent 3D annotations. Nevertheless, it is time-consuming and expensive to collect and annotate real-world data, especially for V2X systems. In this paper, we present a self-supervised learning method for V2X cooperative perception, which utilizes the vast amount of unlabeled 3D V2X data to enhance the perception performance. Beyond simply extending the previous pre-training methods for point-cloud representation learning, we introduce a novel self-supervised Cooperative Pretraining framework (termed as CooPre) customized for a collaborative scenario. We point out that cooperative point-cloud sensing compensates for information loss among agents. This motivates us to design a novel proxy task for the 3D encoder to reconstruct LiDAR point clouds across different agents. Besides, we develop a V2X bird-eye-view (BEV) guided masking strategy which effectively allows the model to pay attention to 3D features across heterogeneous V2X agents (i.e., vehicles and infrastructure) in the BEV space. Noticeably, such a masking strategy effectively pretrains the 3D encoder and is compatible with mainstream cooperative perception backbones. Our approach, validated through extensive experiments on representative datasets (i.e., V2X-Real, V2V4Real, and OPV2V), leads to a performance boost across all V2X settings. Additionally, we demonstrate the framework's improvements in cross-domain transferability, data efficiency, and robustness under challenging scenarios. The code will be made publicly available.

MetaUrban: A Simulation Platform for Embodied AI in Urban Spaces

Public urban spaces like streetscapes and plazas serve residents and accommodate social life in all its vibrant variations. Recent advances in Robotics and Embodied AI make public urban spaces no longer exclusive to humans. Food delivery bots and electric wheelchairs have started sharing sidewalks with pedestrians, while diverse robot dogs and humanoids have recently emerged in the street. Ensuring the generalizability and safety of these forthcoming mobile machines is crucial when navigating through the bustling streets in urban spaces. In this work, we present MetaUrban, a compositional simulation platform for Embodied AI research in urban spaces. MetaUrban can construct an infinite number of interactive urban scenes from compositional elements, covering a vast array of ground plans, object placements, pedestrians, vulnerable road users, and other mobile agents' appearances and dynamics. We design point navigation and social navigation tasks as the pilot study using MetaUrban for embodied AI research and establish various baselines of Reinforcement Learning and Imitation Learning. Experiments demonstrate that the compositional nature of the simulated environments can substantially improve the generalizability and safety of the trained mobile agents. MetaUrban will be made publicly available to provide more research opportunities and foster safe and trustworthy embodied AI in urban spaces.

SimGen: Simulator-conditioned Driving Scene Generation

Controllable synthetic data generation can substantially lower the annotation cost of training data in autonomous driving research and development. Prior works use diffusion models to generate driving images conditioned on the 3D object layout. However, those models are trained on small-scale datasets like nuScenes, which lack appearance and layout diversity. Moreover, the trained models can only generate images based on the real-world layout data from the validation set of the same dataset, where overfitting might happen. In this work, we introduce a simulator-conditioned scene generation framework called SimGen that can learn to generate diverse driving scenes by mixing data from the simulator and the real world. It uses a novel cascade diffusion pipeline to address challenging sim-to-real gaps and multi-condition conflicts. A driving video dataset DIVA is collected to enhance the generative diversity of SimGen, which contains over 147.5 hours of real-world driving videos from 73 locations worldwide and simulated driving data from the MetaDrive simulator. SimGen achieves superior generation quality and diversity while preserving controllability based on the text prompt and the layout pulled from a simulator. We further demonstrate the improvements brought by SimGen for synthetic data augmentation on the BEV detection and segmentation task and showcase its capability in safety-critical data generation. Code, data, and models will be made available.