CALMM-Drive: Confidence-Aware Autonomous Driving with Large Multimodal Model

Decision-making and motion planning are pivotal in ensuring the safety and efficiency of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Existing methodologies typically adopt two paradigms: decision then planning or generation then scoring. However, the former often struggles with misalignment between decisions and planning, while the latter encounters significant challenges in integrating short-term operational utility with long-term tactical efficacy. To address these issues, we introduce CALMM-Drive, a novel Confidence-Aware Large Multimodal Model (LMM) empowered Autonomous Driving framework. Our approach employs Top-K confidence elicitation, which facilitates the generation of multiple candidate decisions along with their confidence levels. Furthermore, we propose a novel planning module that integrates a diffusion model for trajectory generation and a hierarchical refinement process to find the optimal path. This framework enables the selection of the best plan accounting for both low-level solution quality and high-level tactical confidence, which mitigates the risks of one-shot decisions and overcomes the limitations induced by short-sighted scoring mechanisms. Comprehensive evaluations in nuPlan closed-loop simulation environments demonstrate the effectiveness of CALMM-Drive in achieving reliable and flexible driving performance, showcasing a significant advancement in the integration of uncertainty in LMM-empowered AVs. The code will be released upon acceptance.

LMMCoDrive: Cooperative Driving with Large Multimodal Model

To address the intricate challenges of decentralized cooperative scheduling and motion planning in Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand (AMoD) systems, this paper introduces LMMCoDrive, a novel cooperative driving framework that leverages a Large Multimodal Model (LMM) to enhance traffic efficiency in dynamic urban environments. This framework seamlessly integrates scheduling and motion planning processes to ensure the effective operation of Cooperative Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs). The spatial relationship between CAVs and passenger requests is abstracted into a Bird's-Eye View (BEV) to fully exploit the potential of the LMM. Besides, trajectories are cautiously refined for each CAV while ensuring collision avoidance through safety constraints. A decentralized optimization strategy, facilitated by the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) within the LMM framework, is proposed to drive the graph evolution of CAVs. Simulation results demonstrate the pivotal role and significant impact of LMM in optimizing CAV scheduling and enhancing decentralized cooperative optimization process for each vehicle. This marks a substantial stride towards achieving practical, efficient, and safe AMoD systems that are poised to revolutionize urban transportation. The code is available at https://github.com/henryhcliu/LMMCoDrive.