Driving with Regulation: Interpretable Decision-Making for Autonomous Vehicles with Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning via LLM

This work presents an interpretable decision-making framework for autonomous vehicles that integrates traffic regulations, norms, and safety guidelines comprehensively and enables seamless adaptation to different regions. While traditional rule-based methods struggle to incorporate the full scope of traffic rules, we develop a Traffic Regulation Retrieval (TRR) Agent based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to automatically retrieve relevant traffic rules and guidelines from extensive regulation documents and relevant records based on the ego vehicle's situation. Given the semantic complexity of the retrieved rules, we also design a reasoning module powered by a Large Language Model (LLM) to interpret these rules, differentiate between mandatory rules and safety guidelines, and assess actions on legal compliance and safety. Additionally, the reasoning is designed to be interpretable, enhancing both transparency and reliability. The framework demonstrates robust performance on both hypothesized and real-world cases across diverse scenarios, along with the ability to adapt to different regions with ease.

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.

Towards Subcentimeter Accuracy Digital-Twin Tracking via An RGBD-based Transformer Model and A Comprehensive Mobile Dataset

The potential of digital twin technology, involving the creation of precise digital replicas of physical objects, to reshape AR experiences in 3D object tracking and localization scenarios is significant. However, enabling 3D object tracking with subcentimeter accuracy in dynamic mobile AR environments remains a formidable challenge. These scenarios often require a more robust pose estimator capable of handling the inherent sensor-level measurement noise. In this paper, recognizing the absence of comprehensive solutions in existing literature, we build upon our previous work, the Digital Twin Tracking Dataset (DTTD), to address these challenges in mobile AR settings. Specifically, we propose a transformer-based 6DoF pose estimator designed to withstand the challenges posed by noisy depth data. Simultaneously, we introduce a novel RGBD dataset captured using a cutting-edge mobile sensor, the iPhone 14 Pro, expanding the applicability of our approach to iPhone sensor data. Through extensive experimentation and in-depth analysis, we illustrate the effectiveness of our methods in the face of significant depth data errors, surpassing the performance of existing baselines. Code will be made publicly available.

Pre-training on Synthetic Driving Data for Trajectory Prediction

Accumulating substantial volumes of real-world driving data proves pivotal in the realm of trajectory forecasting for autonomous driving. Given the heavy reliance of current trajectory forecasting models on data-driven methodologies, we aim to tackle the challenge of learning general trajectory forecasting representations under limited data availability. We propose to augment both HD maps and trajectories and apply pre-training strategies on top of them. Specifically, we take advantage of graph representations of HD-map and apply vector transformations to reshape the maps, to easily enrich the limited number of scenes. Additionally, we employ a rule-based model to generate trajectories based on augmented scenes; thus enlarging the trajectories beyond the collected real ones. To foster the learning of general representations within this augmented dataset, we comprehensively explore the different pre-training strategies, including extending the concept of a Masked AutoEncoder (MAE) for trajectory forecasting. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our data expansion and pre-training strategies, which outperform the baseline prediction model by large margins, e.g. 5.04%, 3.84% and 8.30% in terms of $MR_6$, $minADE_6$ and $minFDE_6$.

Enhancing GAN-Based Vocoders with Contrastive Learning Under Data-limited Condition

Vocoder models have recently achieved substantial progress in generating authentic audio comparable to human quality while significantly reducing memory requirement and inference time. However, these data-hungry generative models require large-scale audio data for learning good representations. In this paper, we apply contrastive learning methods in training the vocoder to improve the perceptual quality of the vocoder without modifying its architecture or adding more data. We design an auxiliary task with mel-spectrogram contrastive learning to enhance the utterance-level quality of the vocoder model under data-limited conditions. We also extend the task to include waveforms to improve the multi-modality comprehension of the model and address the discriminator overfitting problem. We optimize the additional task simultaneously with GAN training objectives. Our result shows that the tasks improve model performance substantially in data-limited settings. Our analysis based on the result indicates that the proposed design successfully alleviates discriminator overfitting and produces audio of higher fidelity.

Digital Twin Tracking Dataset : A New RGB+Depth 3D Dataset for Longer-Range Object Tracking Applications

Digital twin is a problem of augmenting real objects with their digital counterparts. It can underpin a wide range of applications in augmented reality (AR), autonomy, and UI/UX. A critical component in a good digital twin system is real-time, accurate 3D object tracking. Most existing works solve 3D object tracking through the lens of robotic grasping, employ older generations of depth sensors, and measure performance metrics that may not apply to other digital twin applications such as in AR. In this work, we create a novel RGB-D dataset, called Digital-Twin Tracking Dataset (DTTD), to enable further research of the problem and extend potential solutions towards longer ranges and mm localization accuracy. To reduce point cloud noise from the input source, we select the latest Microsoft Azure Kinect as the state-of-the-art time-of-flight (ToF) camera. In total, 103 scenes of 10 common off-the-shelf objects with rich textures are recorded, with each frame annotated with a per-pixel semantic segmentation and ground-truth object poses provided by a commercial motion capturing system. Through experiments, we demonstrate that DTTD can help researchers develop future object tracking methods and analyze new challenges. We provide the dataset, data generation, annotation, and model evaluation pipeline as open source code at: https://github.com/augcog/DTTDv1.

Misinformation Detection in Social Media Video Posts

With the growing adoption of short-form video by social media platforms, reducing the spread of misinformation through video posts has become a critical challenge for social media providers. In this paper, we develop methods to detect misinformation in social media posts, exploiting modalities such as video and text. Due to the lack of large-scale public data for misinformation detection in multi-modal datasets, we collect 160,000 video posts from Twitter, and leverage self-supervised learning to learn expressive representations of joint visual and textual data. In this work, we propose two new methods for detecting semantic inconsistencies within short-form social media video posts, based on contrastive learning and masked language modeling. We demonstrate that our new approaches outperform current state-of-the-art methods on both artificial data generated by random-swapping of positive samples and in the wild on a new manually-labeled test set for semantic misinformation.