MapDistill: Boosting Efficient Camera-based HD Map Construction via Camera-LiDAR Fusion Model Distillation

Online high-definition (HD) map construction is an important and challenging task in autonomous driving. Recently, there has been a growing interest in cost-effective multi-view camera-based methods without relying on other sensors like LiDAR. However, these methods suffer from a lack of explicit depth information, necessitating the use of large models to achieve satisfactory performance. To address this, we employ the Knowledge Distillation (KD) idea for efficient HD map construction for the first time and introduce a novel KD-based approach called MapDistill to transfer knowledge from a high-performance camera-LiDAR fusion model to a lightweight camera-only model. Specifically, we adopt the teacher-student architecture, i.e., a camera-LiDAR fusion model as the teacher and a lightweight camera model as the student, and devise a dual BEV transform module to facilitate cross-modal knowledge distillation while maintaining cost-effective camera-only deployment. Additionally, we present a comprehensive distillation scheme encompassing cross-modal relation distillation, dual-level feature distillation, and map head distillation. This approach alleviates knowledge transfer challenges between modalities, enabling the student model to learn improved feature representations for HD map construction. Experimental results on the challenging nuScenes dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of MapDistill, surpassing existing competitors by over 7.7 mAP or 4.5X speedup.

HIMap: HybrId Representation Learning for End-to-end Vectorized HD Map Construction

Vectorized High-Definition (HD) map construction requires predictions of the category and point coordinates of map elements (e.g. road boundary, lane divider, pedestrian crossing, etc.). State-of-the-art methods are mainly based on point-level representation learning for regressing accurate point coordinates. However, this pipeline has limitations in obtaining element-level information and handling element-level failures, e.g. erroneous element shape or entanglement between elements. To tackle the above issues, we propose a simple yet effective HybrId framework named HIMap to sufficiently learn and interact both point-level and element-level information. Concretely, we introduce a hybrid representation called HIQuery to represent all map elements, and propose a point-element interactor to interactively extract and encode the hybrid information of elements, e.g. point position and element shape, into the HIQuery. Additionally, we present a point-element consistency constraint to enhance the consistency between the point-level and element-level information. Finally, the output point-element integrated HIQuery can be directly converted into map elements' class, point coordinates, and mask. We conduct extensive experiments and consistently outperform previous methods on both nuScenes and Argoverse2 datasets. Notably, our method achieves $77.8$ mAP on the nuScenes dataset, remarkably superior to previous SOTAs by $8.3$ mAP at least.

Object-Centric Multi-Task Learning for Human Instances

Human is one of the most essential classes in visual recognition tasks such as detection, segmentation, and pose estimation. Although much effort has been put into individual tasks, multi-task learning for these three tasks has been rarely studied. In this paper, we explore a compact multi-task network architecture that maximally shares the parameters of the multiple tasks via object-centric learning. To this end, we propose a novel query design to encode the human instance information effectively, called human-centric query (HCQ). HCQ enables for the query to learn explicit and structural information of human as well such as keypoints. Besides, we utilize HCQ in prediction heads of the target tasks directly and also interweave HCQ with the deformable attention in Transformer decoders to exploit a well-learned object-centric representation. Experimental results show that the proposed multi-task network achieves comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art task-specific models in human detection, segmentation, and pose estimation task, while it consumes less computational costs.