Towards Foundational Models for Single-Chip Radar

mmWave radars are compact, inexpensive, and durable sensors that are robust to occlusions and work regardless of environmental conditions, such as weather and darkness. However, this comes at the cost of poor angular resolution, especially for inexpensive single-chip radars, which are typically used in automotive and indoor sensing applications. Although many have proposed learning-based methods to mitigate this weakness, no standardized foundational models or large datasets for the mmWave radar have emerged, and practitioners have largely trained task-specific models from scratch using relatively small datasets. In this paper, we collect (to our knowledge) the largest available raw radar dataset with 1M samples (29 hours) and train a foundational model for 4D single-chip radar, which can predict 3D occupancy and semantic segmentation with quality that is typically only possible with much higher resolution sensors. We demonstrate that our Generalizable Radar Transformer (GRT) generalizes across diverse settings, can be fine-tuned for different tasks, and shows logarithmic data scaling of 20\% per $10\times$ data. We also run extensive ablations on common design decisions, and find that using raw radar data significantly outperforms widely-used lossy representations, equivalent to a $10\times$ increase in training data. Finally, we roughly estimate that $\approx$100M samples (3000 hours) of data are required to fully exploit the potential of GRT.

Generating Transferable Adversarial Simulation Scenarios for Self-Driving via Neural Rendering

Self-driving software pipelines include components that are learned from a significant number of training examples, yet it remains challenging to evaluate the overall system's safety and generalization performance. Together with scaling up the real-world deployment of autonomous vehicles, it is of critical importance to automatically find simulation scenarios where the driving policies will fail. We propose a method that efficiently generates adversarial simulation scenarios for autonomous driving by solving an optimal control problem that aims to maximally perturb the policy from its nominal trajectory. Given an image-based driving policy, we show that we can inject new objects in a neural rendering representation of the deployment scene, and optimize their texture in order to generate adversarial sensor inputs to the policy. We demonstrate that adversarial scenarios discovered purely in the neural renderer (surrogate scene) can often be successfully transferred to the deployment scene, without further optimization. We demonstrate this transfer occurs both in simulated and real environments, provided the learned surrogate scene is sufficiently close to the deployment scene.

Implicit Neural Head Synthesis via Controllable Local Deformation Fields

High-quality reconstruction of controllable 3D head avatars from 2D videos is highly desirable for virtual human applications in movies, games, and telepresence. Neural implicit fields provide a powerful representation to model 3D head avatars with personalized shape, expressions, and facial parts, e.g., hair and mouth interior, that go beyond the linear 3D morphable model (3DMM). However, existing methods do not model faces with fine-scale facial features, or local control of facial parts that extrapolate asymmetric expressions from monocular videos. Further, most condition only on 3DMM parameters with poor(er) locality, and resolve local features with a global neural field. We build on part-based implicit shape models that decompose a global deformation field into local ones. Our novel formulation models multiple implicit deformation fields with local semantic rig-like control via 3DMM-based parameters, and representative facial landmarks. Further, we propose a local control loss and attention mask mechanism that promote sparsity of each learned deformation field. Our formulation renders sharper locally controllable nonlinear deformations than previous implicit monocular approaches, especially mouth interior, asymmetric expressions, and facial details.