CoVLA: Comprehensive Vision-Language-Action Dataset for Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving, particularly navigating complex and unanticipated scenarios, demands sophisticated reasoning and planning capabilities. While Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer a promising avenue for this, their use has been largely confined to understanding complex environmental contexts or generating high-level driving commands, with few studies extending their application to end-to-end path planning. A major research bottleneck is the lack of large-scale annotated datasets encompassing vision, language, and action. To address this issue, we propose CoVLA (Comprehensive Vision-Language-Action) Dataset, an extensive dataset comprising real-world driving videos spanning more than 80 hours. This dataset leverages a novel, scalable approach based on automated data processing and a caption generation pipeline to generate accurate driving trajectories paired with detailed natural language descriptions of driving environments and maneuvers. This approach utilizes raw in-vehicle sensor data, allowing it to surpass existing datasets in scale and annotation richness. Using CoVLA, we investigate the driving capabilities of MLLMs that can handle vision, language, and action in a variety of driving scenarios. Our results illustrate the strong proficiency of our model in generating coherent language and action outputs, emphasizing the potential of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in the field of autonomous driving. This dataset establishes a framework for robust, interpretable, and data-driven autonomous driving systems by providing a comprehensive platform for training and evaluating VLA models, contributing to safer and more reliable self-driving vehicles. The dataset is released for academic purpose.

Multichannel Semantic Segmentation with Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Most contemporary robots have depth sensors, and research on semantic segmentation with RGBD images has shown that depth images boost the accuracy of segmentation. Since it is time-consuming to annotate images with semantic labels per pixel, it would be ideal if we could avoid this laborious work by utilizing an existing dataset or a synthetic dataset which we can generate on our own. Robot motions are often tested in a synthetic environment, where multichannel (eg, RGB + depth + instance boundary) images plus their pixel-level semantic labels are available. However, models trained simply on synthetic images tend to demonstrate poor performance on real images. In order to address this, we propose two approaches that can efficiently exploit multichannel inputs combined with an unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) algorithm. One is a fusion-based approach that uses depth images as inputs. The other is a multitask learning approach that uses depth images as outputs. We demonstrated that the segmentation results were improved by using a multitask learning approach with a post-process and created a benchmark for this task.

Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

In this work, we present a method for unsupervised domain adaptation. Many adversarial learning methods train domain classifier networks to distinguish the features as either a source or target and train a feature generator network to mimic the discriminator. Two problems exist with these methods. First, the domain classifier only tries to distinguish the features as a source or target and thus does not consider task-specific decision boundaries between classes. Therefore, a trained generator can generate ambiguous features near class boundaries. Second, these methods aim to completely match the feature distributions between different domains, which is difficult because of each domain's characteristics. To solve these problems, we introduce a new approach that attempts to align distributions of source and target by utilizing the task-specific decision boundaries. We propose to maximize the discrepancy between two classifiers' outputs to detect target samples that are far from the support of the source. A feature generator learns to generate target features near the support to minimize the discrepancy. Our method outperforms other methods on several datasets of image classification and semantic segmentation. The codes are available at \url{https://github.com/mil-tokyo/MCD_DA}