MiniDrive: More Efficient Vision-Language Models with Multi-Level 2D Features as Text Tokens for Autonomous Driving

Vision-language models (VLMs) serve as general-purpose end-to-end models in autonomous driving, performing subtasks such as prediction, planning, and perception through question-and-answer interactions. However, most existing methods rely on computationally expensive visual encoders and large language models (LLMs), making them difficult to deploy in real-world scenarios and real-time applications. Meanwhile, most existing VLMs lack the ability to process multiple images, making it difficult to adapt to multi-camera perception in autonomous driving. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework called MiniDrive, which incorporates our proposed Feature Engineering Mixture of Experts (FE-MoE) module and Dynamic Instruction Adapter (DI-Adapter). The FE-MoE effectively maps 2D features into visual token embeddings before being input into the language model. The DI-Adapter enables the visual token embeddings to dynamically change with the instruction text embeddings, resolving the issue of static visual token embeddings for the same image in previous approaches. Compared to previous works, MiniDrive achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of parameter size, floating point operations, and response efficiency, with the smallest version containing only 83M parameters.

S4TP: Social-Suitable and Safety-Sensitive Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Vehicles

In public roads, autonomous vehicles (AVs) face the challenge of frequent interactions with human-driven vehicles (HDVs), which render uncertain driving behavior due to varying social characteristics among humans. To effectively assess the risks prevailing in the vicinity of AVs in social interactive traffic scenarios and achieve safe autonomous driving, this article proposes a social-suitable and safety-sensitive trajectory planning (S4TP) framework. Specifically, S4TP integrates the Social-Aware Trajectory Prediction (SATP) and Social-Aware Driving Risk Field (SADRF) modules. SATP utilizes Transformers to effectively encode the driving scene and incorporates an AV's planned trajectory during the prediction decoding process. SADRF assesses the expected surrounding risk degrees during AVs-HDVs interactions, each with different social characteristics, visualized as two-dimensional heat maps centered on the AV. SADRF models the driving intentions of the surrounding HDVs and predicts trajectories based on the representation of vehicular interactions. S4TP employs an optimization-based approach for motion planning, utilizing the predicted HDVs'trajectories as input. With the integration of SADRF, S4TP executes real-time online optimization of the planned trajectory of AV within lowrisk regions, thus improving the safety and the interpretability of the planned trajectory. We have conducted comprehensive tests of the proposed method using the SMARTS simulator. Experimental results in complex social scenarios, such as unprotected left turn intersections, merging, cruising, and overtaking, validate the superiority of our proposed S4TP in terms of safety and rationality. S4TP achieves a pass rate of 100% across all scenarios, surpassing the current state-of-the-art methods Fanta of 98.25% and Predictive-Decision of 94.75%.

SC-Tune: Unleashing Self-Consistent Referential Comprehension in Large Vision Language Models

Recent trends in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) research have been increasingly focusing on advancing beyond general image understanding towards more nuanced, object-level referential comprehension. In this paper, we present and delve into the self-consistency capability of LVLMs, a crucial aspect that reflects the models' ability to both generate informative captions for specific objects and subsequently utilize these captions to accurately re-identify the objects in a closed-loop process. This capability significantly mirrors the precision and reliability of fine-grained visual-language understanding. Our findings reveal that the self-consistency level of existing LVLMs falls short of expectations, posing limitations on their practical applicability and potential. To address this gap, we introduce a novel fine-tuning paradigm named Self-Consistency Tuning (SC-Tune). It features the synergistic learning of a cyclic describer-locator system. This paradigm is not only data-efficient but also exhibits generalizability across multiple LVLMs. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that SC-Tune significantly elevates performance across a spectrum of object-level vision-language benchmarks and maintains competitive or improved performance on image-level vision-language benchmarks. Both our model and code will be publicly available at https://github.com/ivattyue/SC-Tune.

RIME: Robust Preference-based Reinforcement Learning with Noisy Preferences

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) avoids the need for reward engineering by harnessing human preferences as the reward signal. However, current PbRL algorithms over-reliance on high-quality feedback from domain experts, which results in a lack of robustness. In this paper, we present RIME, a robust PbRL algorithm for effective reward learning from noisy preferences. Our method incorporates a sample selection-based discriminator to dynamically filter denoised preferences for robust training. To mitigate the accumulated error caused by incorrect selection, we propose to warm start the reward model, which additionally bridges the performance gap during transition from pre-training to online training in PbRL. Our experiments on robotic manipulation and locomotion tasks demonstrate that RIME significantly enhances the robustness of the current state-of-the-art PbRL method. Ablation studies further demonstrate that the warm start is crucial for both robustness and feedback-efficiency in limited-feedback cases.

Counterfactual Graph Transformer for Traffic Flow Prediction

Traffic flow prediction (TFP) is a fundamental problem of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), as it models the latent spatial-temporal dependency of traffic flow for potential congestion prediction. Recent graph-based models with multiple kinds of attention mechanisms have achieved promising performance. However, existing methods for traffic flow prediction tend to inherit the bias pattern from the dataset and lack interpretability. To this end, we propose a Counterfactual Graph Transformer (CGT) model with an instance-level explainer (e.g., finding the important subgraphs) specifically designed for TFP. We design a perturbation mask generator over input sensor features at the time dimension and the graph structure on the graph transformer module to obtain spatial and temporal counterfactual explanations. By searching the optimal perturbation masks on the input data feature and graph structures, we can obtain the concise and dominant data or graph edge links for the subsequent TFP task. After re-training the utilized graph transformer model after counterfactual perturbation, we can obtain improved and interpretable traffic flow prediction. Extensive results on three real-world public datasets show that CGT can produce reliable explanations and is promising for traffic flow prediction.

Towards Integrated Traffic Control with Operating Decentralized Autonomous Organization

With a growing complexity of the intelligent traffic system (ITS), an integrated control of ITS that is capable of considering plentiful heterogeneous intelligent agents is desired. However, existing control methods based on the centralized or the decentralized scheme have not presented their competencies in considering the optimality and the scalability simultaneously. To address this issue, we propose an integrated control method based on the framework of Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). The proposed method achieves a global consensus on energy consumption efficiency (ECE), meanwhile to optimize the local objectives of all involved intelligent agents, through a consensus and incentive mechanism. Furthermore, an operation algorithm is proposed regarding the issue of structural rigidity in DAO. Specifically, the proposed operation approach identifies critical agents to execute the smart contract in DAO, which ultimately extends the capability of DAO-based control. In addition, a numerical experiment is designed to examine the performance of the proposed method. The experiment results indicate that the controlled agents can achieve a consensus faster on the global objective with improved local objectives by the proposed method, compare to existing decentralized control methods. In general, the proposed method shows a great potential in developing an integrated control system in the ITS

An Efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning Model for Urban Traffic Control

Urban Traffic Control (UTC) plays an essential role in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) but remains difficult. Since model-based UTC methods may not accurately describe the complex nature of traffic dynamics in all situations, model-free data-driven UTC methods, especially reinforcement learning (RL) based UTC methods, received increasing interests in the last decade. However, existing DL approaches did not propose an efficient algorithm to solve the complicated multiple intersections control problems whose state-action spaces are vast. To solve this problem, we propose a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithm that combines several tricks to master an appropriate control strategy within an acceptable time. This new algorithm relaxes the fixed traffic demand pattern assumption and reduces human invention in parameter tuning. Simulation experiments have shown that our method outperforms traditional rule-based approaches and has the potential to handle more complex traffic problems in the real world.

DeepTrend: A Deep Hierarchical Neural Network for Traffic Flow Prediction

In this paper, we consider the temporal pattern in traffic flow time series, and implement a deep learning model for traffic flow prediction. Detrending based methods decompose original flow series into trend and residual series, in which trend describes the fixed temporal pattern in traffic flow and residual series is used for prediction. Inspired by the detrending method, we propose DeepTrend, a deep hierarchical neural network used for traffic flow prediction which considers and extracts the time-variant trend. DeepTrend has two stacked layers: extraction layer and prediction layer. Extraction layer, a fully connected layer, is used to extract the time-variant trend in traffic flow by feeding the original flow series concatenated with corresponding simple average trend series. Prediction layer, an LSTM layer, is used to make flow prediction by feeding the obtained trend from the output of extraction layer and calculated residual series. To make the model more effective, DeepTrend needs first pre-trained layer-by-layer and then fine-tuned in the entire network. Experiments show that DeepTrend can noticeably boost the prediction performance compared with some traditional prediction models and LSTM with detrending based methods.