PKRD-CoT: A Unified Chain-of-thought Prompting for Multi-Modal Large Language Models in Autonomous Driving

There is growing interest in leveraging the capabilities of robust Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) directly within autonomous driving contexts. However, the high costs and complexity of designing and training end-to-end autonomous driving models make them challenging for many enterprises and research entities. To address this, our study explores a seamless integration of MLLMs into autonomous driving systems by proposing a Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought (Zero-Shot-CoT) prompt design named PKRD-CoT. PKRD-CoT is based on the four fundamental capabilities of autonomous driving: perception, knowledge, reasoning, and decision-making. This makes it particularly suitable for understanding and responding to dynamic driving environments by mimicking human thought processes step by step, thus enhancing decision-making in real-time scenarios. Our design enables MLLMs to tackle problems without prior experience, thereby increasing their utility within unstructured autonomous driving environments. In experiments, we demonstrate the exceptional performance of GPT-4.0 with PKRD-CoT across autonomous driving tasks, highlighting its effectiveness in autonomous driving scenarios. Additionally, our benchmark analysis reveals the promising viability of PKRD-CoT for other MLLMs, such as Claude, LLava1.6, and Qwen-VL-Plus. Overall, this study contributes a novel and unified prompt-design framework for GPT-4.0 and other MLLMs in autonomous driving, while also rigorously evaluating the efficacy of these widely recognized MLLMs in the autonomous driving domain through comprehensive comparisons.

Cross-Domain Transfer Learning using Attention Latent Features for Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction

With the advancements of sensor hardware, traffic infrastructure and deep learning architectures, trajectory prediction of vehicles has established a solid foundation in intelligent transportation systems. However, existing solutions are often tailored to specific traffic networks at particular time periods. Consequently, deep learning models trained on one network may struggle to generalize effectively to unseen networks. To address this, we proposed a novel spatial-temporal trajectory prediction framework that performs cross-domain adaption on the attention representation of a Transformer-based model. A graph convolutional network is also integrated to construct dynamic graph feature embeddings that accurately model the complex spatial-temporal interactions between the multi-agent vehicles across multiple traffic domains. The proposed framework is validated on two case studies involving the cross-city and cross-period settings. Experimental results show that our proposed framework achieves superior trajectory prediction and domain adaptation performances over the state-of-the-art models.

Energy-efficient Hybrid Model Predictive Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Electric Vehicles

To tackle the twin challenges of limited battery life and lengthy charging durations in electric vehicles (EVs), this paper introduces an Energy-efficient Hybrid Model Predictive Planner (EHMPP), which employs an energy-saving optimization strategy. EHMPP focuses on refining the design of the motion planner to be seamlessly integrated with the existing automatic driving algorithms, without additional hardware. It has been validated through simulation experiments on the Prescan, CarSim, and Matlab platforms, demonstrating that it can increase passive recovery energy by 11.74\% and effectively track motor speed and acceleration at optimal power. To sum up, EHMPP not only aids in trajectory planning but also significantly boosts energy efficiency in autonomous EVs.

Underwater Acoustic Signal Denoising Algorithms: A Survey of the State-of-the-art

This paper comprehensively reviews recent advances in underwater acoustic signal denoising, an area critical for improving the reliability and clarity of underwater communication and monitoring systems. Despite significant progress in the field, the complex nature of underwater environments poses unique challenges that complicate the denoising process. We begin by outlining the fundamental challenges associated with underwater acoustic signal processing, including signal attenuation, noise variability, and the impact of environmental factors. The review then systematically categorizes and discusses various denoising algorithms, such as conventional, decomposition-based, and learning-based techniques, highlighting their applications, advantages, and limitations. Evaluation metrics and experimental datasets are also reviewed. The paper concludes with a list of open questions and recommendations for future research directions, emphasizing the need for developing more robust denoising techniques that can adapt to the dynamic underwater acoustic environment.

RIS-Based On-the-Air Semantic Communications -- a Diffractional Deep Neural Network Approach

Semantic communication has gained significant attention recently due to its advantages in achieving higher transmission efficiency by focusing on semantic information instead of bit-level information. However, current AI-based semantic communication methods require digital hardware for implementation. With the rapid advancement on reconfigurable intelligence surfaces (RISs), a new approach called on-the-air diffractional deep neural networks (D$^2$NN) can be utilized to enable semantic communications on the wave domain. This paper proposes a new paradigm of RIS-based on-the-air semantic communications, where the computational process occurs inherently as wireless signals pass through RISs. We present the system model and discuss the data and control flows of this scheme, followed by a performance analysis using image transmission as an example. In comparison to traditional hardware-based approaches, RIS-based semantic communications offer appealing features, such as light-speed computation, low computational power requirements, and the ability to handle multiple tasks simultaneously.

DiPCo -- Dinner Party Corpus

We present a speech data corpus that simulates a "dinner party" scenario taking place in an everyday home environment. The corpus was created by recording multiple groups of four Amazon employee volunteers having a natural conversation in English around a dining table. The participants were recorded by a single-channel close-talk microphone and by five far-field 7-microphone array devices positioned at different locations in the recording room. The dataset contains the audio recordings and human labeled transcripts of a total of 10 sessions with a duration between 15 and 45 minutes. The corpus was created to advance in the field of noise robust and distant speech processing and is intended to serve as a public research and benchmarking data set.