T2SG: Traffic Topology Scene Graph for Topology Reasoning in Autonomous Driving

Understanding the traffic scenes and then generating high-definition (HD) maps present significant challenges in autonomous driving. In this paper, we defined a novel Traffic Topology Scene Graph, a unified scene graph explicitly modeling the lane, controlled and guided by different road signals (e.g., right turn), and topology relationships among them, which is always ignored by previous high-definition (HD) mapping methods. For the generation of T2SG, we propose TopoFormer, a novel one-stage Topology Scene Graph TransFormer with two newly designed layers. Specifically, TopoFormer incorporates a Lane Aggregation Layer (LAL) that leverages the geometric distance among the centerline of lanes to guide the aggregation of global information. Furthermore, we proposed a Counterfactual Intervention Layer (CIL) to model the reasonable road structure ( e.g., intersection, straight) among lanes under counterfactual intervention. Then the generated T2SG can provide a more accurate and explainable description of the topological structure in traffic scenes. Experimental results demonstrate that TopoFormer outperforms existing methods on the T2SG generation task, and the generated T2SG significantly enhances traffic topology reasoning in downstream tasks, achieving a state-of-the-art performance of 46.3 OLS on the OpenLane-V2 benchmark. We will release our source code and model.

Disentangled Counterfactual Learning for Physical Audiovisual Commonsense Reasoning

In this paper, we propose a Disentangled Counterfactual Learning~(DCL) approach for physical audiovisual commonsense reasoning. The task aims to infer objects' physics commonsense based on both video and audio input, with the main challenge is how to imitate the reasoning ability of humans. Most of the current methods fail to take full advantage of different characteristics in multi-modal data, and lacking causal reasoning ability in models impedes the progress of implicit physical knowledge inferring. To address these issues, our proposed DCL method decouples videos into static (time-invariant) and dynamic (time-varying) factors in the latent space by the disentangled sequential encoder, which adopts a variational autoencoder (VAE) to maximize the mutual information with a contrastive loss function. Furthermore, we introduce a counterfactual learning module to augment the model's reasoning ability by modeling physical knowledge relationships among different objects under counterfactual intervention. Our proposed method is a plug-and-play module that can be incorporated into any baseline. In experiments, we show that our proposed method improves baseline methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Andy20178/DCL.

Revisiting Transformer for Point Cloud-based 3D Scene Graph Generation

In this paper, we propose the semantic graph Transformer (SGT) for 3D scene graph generation. The task aims to parse a cloud point-based scene into a semantic structural graph, with the core challenge of modeling the complex global structure. Existing methods based on graph convolutional networks (GCNs) suffer from the over-smoothing dilemma and could only propagate information from limited neighboring nodes. In contrast, our SGT uses Transformer layers as the base building block to allow global information passing, with two types of proposed Transformer layers tailored for the 3D scene graph generation task. Specifically, we introduce the graph embedding layer to best utilize the global information in graph edges while maintaining comparable computation costs. Additionally, we propose the semantic injection layer to leverage categorical text labels and visual object knowledge. We benchmark our SGT on the established 3DSSG benchmark and achieve a 35.9% absolute improvement in relationship prediction's R@50 and an 80.4% boost on the subset with complex scenes over the state-of-the-art. Our analyses further show SGT's superiority in the long-tailed and zero-shot scenarios. We will release the code and model.