Abstract:Simulation is essential for autonomous driving, yet current frameworks often model vehicles as rigid assets and fail to capture part-level articulation. With perception algorithms increasingly leveraging dynamics such as wheel steering or door opening, realistic simulation requires animatable vehicle representations. Existing CAD-based pipelines are limited by library coverage and fixed templates, preventing faithful reconstruction of in-the-wild instances. We propose a generative framework that, from a single image or sparse multi-view input, synthesizes an animatable 3D Gaussian vehicle. Our method addresses two challenges: (i) large 3D asset generators are optimized for static quality but not articulation, leading to distortions at part boundaries when animated; and (ii) segmentation alone cannot provide the kinematic parameters required for motion. To overcome this, we introduce a part-edge refinement module that enforces exclusive Gaussian ownership and a kinematic reasoning head that predicts joint positions and hinge axes of movable parts. Together, these components enable faithful part-aware simulation, bridging the gap between static generation and animatable vehicle models.
Abstract:Vision-based autonomous driving has gained much attention due to its low costs and excellent performance. Compared with dense BEV (Bird's Eye View) or sparse query models, Gaussian-centric method is a comprehensive yet sparse representation by describing scene with 3D semantic Gaussians. In this paper, we introduce DLWM, a novel paradigm with Dual Latent World Models specifically designed to enable holistic gaussian-centric pre-training in autonomous driving using two stages. In the first stage, DLWM predicts 3D Gaussians from queries by self-supervised reconstructing multi-view semantic and depth images. Equipped with fine-grained contextual features, in the second stage, two latent world models are trained separately for temporal feature learning, including Gaussian-flow-guided latent prediction for downstream occupancy perception and forecasting tasks, and ego-planning-guided latent prediction for motion planning. Extensive experiments in SurroundOcc and nuScenes benchmarks demonstrate that DLWM shows significant performance gains across Gaussian-centric 3D occupancy perception, 4D occupancy forecasting and motion planning tasks.
Abstract:Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models map visual observations and language instructions directly to robotic actions. While effective for simple tasks, standard VLA models often struggle with complex, multi-step tasks requiring logical planning, as well as precise manipulations demanding fine-grained spatial perception. Recent efforts have incorporated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to endow VLA models with a ``thinking before acting'' capability. However, current CoT-based VLA models face two critical limitations: 1) an inability to simultaneously capture low-level visual details and high-level logical planning due to their reliance on isolated, single-modal CoT; 2) high inference latency with compounding errors caused by step-by-step autoregressive decoding. To address these limitations, we propose DualCoT-VLA, a visual-linguistic CoT method for VLA models with a parallel reasoning mechanism. To achieve comprehensive multi-modal reasoning, our method integrates a visual CoT for low-level spatial understanding and a linguistic CoT for high-level task planning. Furthermore, to overcome the latency bottleneck, we introduce a parallel CoT mechanism that incorporates two sets of learnable query tokens, shifting autoregressive reasoning to single-step forward reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DualCoT-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on the LIBERO and RoboCasa GR1 benchmarks, as well as in real-world platforms.
Abstract:Video action models (VAMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for robot learning, owing to their powerful visual foresight for complex manipulation tasks. However, current VAMs, typically relying on either slow multi-step video generation or noisy one-step feature extraction, cannot simultaneously guarantee real-time inference and high-fidelity foresight. To address this limitation, we propose S-VAM, a shortcut video-action model that foresees coherent geometric and semantic representations via a single forward pass. Serving as a stable blueprint, these foreseen representations significantly simplify the action prediction. To enable this efficient shortcut, we introduce a novel self-distillation strategy that condenses structured generative priors of multi-step denoising into one-step inference. Specifically, vision foundation model (VFM) representations extracted from the diffusion model's own multi-step generated videos provide teacher targets. Lightweight decouplers, as students, learn to directly map noisy one-step features to these targets. Extensive experiments in simulation and the real world demonstrate that our S-VAM outperforms state-of-the-art methods, enabling efficient and precise manipulation in complex environments. Our project page is https://haodong-yan.github.io/S-VAM/
Abstract:While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in semantic tasks, they frequently lack the "spatial sense" essential for sophisticated geometric reasoning. Current models typically suffer from exorbitant modality-alignment costs and deficiency in fine-grained structural modeling precision.We introduce SSR, a framework designed for Structured Scene Reasoning that seamlessly integrates 2D and 3D representations via a lightweight alignment mechanism. To minimize training overhead, our framework anchors 3D geometric features to the large language model's pre-aligned 2D visual semantics through cross-modal addition and token interleaving, effectively obviating the necessity for large-scale alignment pre-training. To underpin complex spatial reasoning, we propose a novel scene graph generation pipeline that represents global layouts as a chain of independent local triplets defined by relative coordinates. This is complemented by an incremental generation algorithm, enabling the model to construct "language-model-friendly" structural scaffolds for complex environments. Furthermore, we extend these capabilities to global-scale 3D global grounding task, achieving absolute metric precision across heterogeneous data sources. At a 7B parameter scale, SSR achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple spatial intelligence benchmarks, notably scoring 73.9 on VSI-Bench. Our approach significantly outperforms much larger models, demonstrating that efficient feature alignment and structured scene reasoning are the cornerstones of authentic spatial intelligence.
Abstract:We present UniScale, a unified, scale-aware multi-view 3D reconstruction framework for robotic applications that flexibly integrates geometric priors through a modular, semantically informed design. In vision-based robotic navigation, the accurate extraction of environmental structure from raw image sequences is critical for downstream tasks. UniScale addresses this challenge with a single feed-forward network that jointly estimates camera intrinsics and extrinsics, scale-invariant depth and point maps, and the metric scale of a scene from multi-view images, while optionally incorporating auxiliary geometric priors when available. By combining global contextual reasoning with camera-aware feature representations, UniScale is able to recover the metric-scale of the scene. In robotic settings where camera intrinsics are known, they can be easily incorporated to improve performance, with additional gains obtained when camera poses are also available. This co-design enables robust, metric-aware 3D reconstruction within a single unified model. Importantly, UniScale does not require training from scratch, and leverages world priors exhibited in pre-existing models without geometric encoding strategies, making it particularly suitable for resource-constrained robotic teams. We evaluate UniScale on multiple benchmarks, demonstrating strong generalization and consistent performance across diverse environments. We will release our implementation upon acceptance.
Abstract:Existing 3D open-vocabulary scene understanding methods mostly emphasize distilling language features from 2D foundation models into 3D feature fields, but largely overlook the synergy among scene appearance, semantics, and geometry. As a result, scene understanding often deviates from the underlying geometric structure of scenes and becomes decoupled from the reconstruction process. In this work, we propose a novel approach that leverages language and geometry grounded sparse voxel representations to comprehensively model appearance, semantics, and geometry within a unified framework. Specifically, we use 3D sparse voxels as primitives and employ an appearance field, a density field, a feature field, and a confidence field to holistically represent a 3D scene. To promote synergy among the appearance, density, and feature fields, we construct a feature modulation module and distill language features from a 2D foundation model into our 3D scene model. In addition, we integrate geometric distillation into feature field distillation to transfer geometric knowledge from a geometry foundation model to our 3D scene representations via depth correlation regularization and pattern consistency regularization. These components work together to synergistically model the appearance, semantics, and geometry of the 3D scene within a unified framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior overall performance compared with state-of-the-art methods in holistic scene understanding and reconstruction.
Abstract:This paper focuses on scene reconstruction under nighttime conditions in autonomous driving simulation. Recent methods based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have achieved photorealistic modeling in autonomous driving scene reconstruction, but they primarily focus on normal-light conditions. Low-light driving scenes are more challenging to model due to their complex lighting and appearance conditions, which often causes performance degradation of existing methods. To address this problem, this work presents a novel approach that integrates physically based rendering into 3DGS to enhance nighttime scene reconstruction for autonomous driving. Specifically, our approach integrates physically based rendering into composite scene Gaussian representations and jointly optimizes Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) based material properties. We explicitly model diffuse components through a global illumination module and specular components by anisotropic spherical Gaussians. As a result, our approach improves reconstruction quality for outdoor nighttime driving scenes, while maintaining real-time rendering. Extensive experiments across diverse nighttime scenarios on two real-world autonomous driving datasets, including nuScenes and Waymo, demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Abstract:Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting have advanced novel view synthesis, yet still rely on dense inputs and often degrade at extrapolated views. Recent approaches leverage generative models, such as diffusion models, to provide additional supervision, but face a trade-off between generalization and fidelity: fine-tuning diffusion models for artifact removal improves fidelity but risks overfitting, while fine-tuning-free methods preserve generalization but often yield lower fidelity. We introduce FreeFix, a fine-tuning-free approach that pushes the boundary of this trade-off by enhancing extrapolated rendering with pretrained image diffusion models. We present an interleaved 2D-3D refinement strategy, showing that image diffusion models can be leveraged for consistent refinement without relying on costly video diffusion models. Furthermore, we take a closer look at the guidance signal for 2D refinement and propose a per-pixel confidence mask to identify uncertain regions for targeted improvement. Experiments across multiple datasets show that FreeFix improves multi-frame consistency and achieves performance comparable to or surpassing fine-tuning-based methods, while retaining strong generalization ability.
Abstract:Novel view synthesis (NVS) of static and dynamic urban scenes is essential for autonomous driving simulation, yet existing methods often struggle to balance reconstruction time with quality. While state-of-the-art neural radiance fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting approaches achieve photorealism, they often rely on time-consuming per-scene optimization. Conversely, emerging feed-forward methods frequently adopt per-pixel Gaussian representations, which lead to 3D inconsistencies when aggregating multi-view predictions in complex, dynamic environments. We propose EvolSplat4D, a feed-forward framework that moves beyond existing per-pixel paradigms by unifying volume-based and pixel-based Gaussian prediction across three specialized branches. For close-range static regions, we predict consistent geometry of 3D Gaussians over multiple frames directly from a 3D feature volume, complemented by a semantically-enhanced image-based rendering module for predicting their appearance. For dynamic actors, we utilize object-centric canonical spaces and a motion-adjusted rendering module to aggregate temporal features, ensuring stable 4D reconstruction despite noisy motion priors. Far-Field scenery is handled by an efficient per-pixel Gaussian branch to ensure full-scene coverage. Experimental results on the KITTI-360, KITTI, Waymo, and PandaSet datasets show that EvolSplat4D reconstructs both static and dynamic environments with superior accuracy and consistency, outperforming both per-scene optimization and state-of-the-art feed-forward baselines.