DriveVLM: The Convergence of Autonomous Driving and Large Vision-Language Models

A primary hurdle of autonomous driving in urban environments is understanding complex and long-tail scenarios, such as challenging road conditions and delicate human behaviors. We introduce DriveVLM, an autonomous driving system leveraging Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for enhanced scene understanding and planning capabilities. DriveVLM integrates a unique combination of chain-of-thought (CoT) modules for scene description, scene analysis, and hierarchical planning. Furthermore, recognizing the limitations of VLMs in spatial reasoning and heavy computational requirements, we propose DriveVLM-Dual, a hybrid system that synergizes the strengths of DriveVLM with the traditional autonomous driving pipeline. DriveVLM-Dual achieves robust spatial understanding and real-time inference speed. Extensive experiments on both the nuScenes dataset and our SUP-AD dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of DriveVLM and the enhanced performance of DriveVLM-Dual, surpassing existing methods in complex and unpredictable driving conditions.

From LLM to Conversational Agent: A Memory Enhanced Architecture with Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models

This paper introduces RAISE (Reasoning and Acting through Scratchpad and Examples), an advanced architecture enhancing the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 into conversational agents. RAISE, an enhancement of the ReAct framework, incorporates a dual-component memory system, mirroring human short-term and long-term memory, to maintain context and continuity in conversations. It entails a comprehensive agent construction scenario, including phases like Conversation Selection, Scene Extraction, CoT Completion, and Scene Augmentation, leading to the LLMs Training phase. This approach appears to enhance agent controllability and adaptability in complex, multi-turn dialogues. Our preliminary evaluations in a real estate sales context suggest that RAISE has some advantages over traditional agents, indicating its potential for broader applications. This work contributes to the AI field by providing a robust framework for developing more context-aware and versatile conversational agents.

DUMA: a Dual-Mind Conversational Agent with Fast and Slow Thinking

Inspired by the dual-process theory of human cognition, we introduce DUMA, a novel conversational agent framework that embodies a dual-mind mechanism through the utilization of two generative Large Language Models (LLMs) dedicated to fast and slow thinking respectively. The fast thinking model serves as the primary interface for external interactions and initial response generation, evaluating the necessity for engaging the slow thinking model based on the complexity of the complete response. When invoked, the slow thinking model takes over the conversation, engaging in meticulous planning, reasoning, and tool utilization to provide a well-analyzed response. This dual-mind configuration allows for a seamless transition between intuitive responses and deliberate problem-solving processes based on the situation. We have constructed a conversational agent to handle online inquiries in the real estate industry. The experiment proves that our method balances effectiveness and efficiency, and has a significant improvement compared to the baseline.

GeoMAE: Masked Geometric Target Prediction for Self-supervised Point Cloud Pre-Training

This paper tries to address a fundamental question in point cloud self-supervised learning: what is a good signal we should leverage to learn features from point clouds without annotations? To answer that, we introduce a point cloud representation learning framework, based on geometric feature reconstruction. In contrast to recent papers that directly adopt masked autoencoder (MAE) and only predict original coordinates or occupancy from masked point clouds, our method revisits differences between images and point clouds and identifies three self-supervised learning objectives peculiar to point clouds, namely centroid prediction, normal estimation, and curvature prediction. Combined with occupancy prediction, these four objectives yield an nontrivial self-supervised learning task and mutually facilitate models to better reason fine-grained geometry of point clouds. Our pipeline is conceptually simple and it consists of two major steps: first, it randomly masks out groups of points, followed by a Transformer-based point cloud encoder; second, a lightweight Transformer decoder predicts centroid, normal, and curvature for points in each voxel. We transfer the pre-trained Transformer encoder to a downstream peception model. On the nuScene Datset, our model achieves 3.38 mAP improvment for object detection, 2.1 mIoU gain for segmentation, and 1.7 AMOTA gain for multi-object tracking. We also conduct experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset and achieve significant performance improvements over baselines as well.

Occ3D: A Large-Scale 3D Occupancy Prediction Benchmark for Autonomous Driving

Robotic perception requires the modeling of both 3D geometry and semantics. Existing methods typically focus on estimating 3D bounding boxes, neglecting finer geometric details and struggling to handle general, out-of-vocabulary objects. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel task for 3D occupancy prediction, which aims to estimate the detailed occupancy and semantics of objects from multi-view images. To facilitate this task, we develop a label generation pipeline that produces dense, visibility-aware labels for a given scene. This pipeline includes point cloud aggregation, point labeling, and occlusion handling. We construct two benchmarks based on the Waymo Open Dataset and the nuScenes Dataset, resulting in the Occ3D-Waymo and Occ3D-nuScenes benchmarks. Lastly, we propose a model, dubbed Coarse-to-Fine Occupancy (CTF-Occ) network, which demonstrates superior performance in the 3D occupancy prediction task. This approach addresses the need for finer geometric understanding in a coarse-to-fine fashion. The code, data, and benchmarks are released at https://tsinghua-mars-lab.github.io/Occ3D/.

VectorFlow: Combining Images and Vectors for Traffic Occupancy and Flow Prediction

Predicting future behaviors of road agents is a key task in autonomous driving. While existing models have demonstrated great success in predicting marginal agent future behaviors, it remains a challenge to efficiently predict consistent joint behaviors of multiple agents. Recently, the occupancy flow fields representation was proposed to represent joint future states of road agents through a combination of occupancy grid and flow, which supports efficient and consistent joint predictions. In this work, we propose a novel occupancy flow fields predictor to produce accurate occupancy and flow predictions, by combining the power of an image encoder that learns features from a rasterized traffic image and a vector encoder that captures information of continuous agent trajectories and map states. The two encoded features are fused by multiple attention modules before generating final predictions. Our simple but effective model ranks 3rd place on the Waymo Open Dataset Occupancy and Flow Prediction Challenge, and achieves the best performance in the occluded occupancy and flow prediction task.

Unsupervised Learning of 3D Scene Flow from Monocular Camera

Scene flow represents the motion of points in the 3D space, which is the counterpart of the optical flow that represents the motion of pixels in the 2D image. However, it is difficult to obtain the ground truth of scene flow in the real scenes, and recent studies are based on synthetic data for training. Therefore, how to train a scene flow network with unsupervised methods based on real-world data shows crucial significance. A novel unsupervised learning method for scene flow is proposed in this paper, which utilizes the images of two consecutive frames taken by monocular camera without the ground truth of scene flow for training. Our method realizes the goal that training scene flow network with real-world data, which bridges the gap between training data and test data and broadens the scope of available data for training. Unsupervised learning of scene flow in this paper mainly consists of two parts: (i) depth estimation and camera pose estimation, and (ii) scene flow estimation based on four different loss functions. Depth estimation and camera pose estimation obtain the depth maps and camera pose between two consecutive frames, which provide further information for the next scene flow estimation. After that, we used depth consistency loss, dynamic-static consistency loss, Chamfer loss, and Laplacian regularization loss to carry out unsupervised training of the scene flow network. To our knowledge, this is the first paper that realizes the unsupervised learning of 3D scene flow from monocular camera. The experiment results on KITTI show that our method for unsupervised learning of scene flow meets great performance compared to traditional methods Iterative Closest Point (ICP) and Fast Global Registration (FGR). The source code is available at: https://github.com/IRMVLab/3DUnMonoFlow.