DiffVL: Diffusion-Based Visual Localization on 2D Maps via BEV-Conditioned GPS Denoising

Accurate visual localization is crucial for autonomous driving, yet existing methods face a fundamental dilemma: While high-definition (HD) maps provide high-precision localization references, their costly construction and maintenance hinder scalability, which drives research toward standard-definition (SD) maps like OpenStreetMap. Current SD-map-based approaches primarily focus on Bird's-Eye View (BEV) matching between images and maps, overlooking a ubiquitous signal-noisy GPS. Although GPS is readily available, it suffers from multipath errors in urban environments. We propose DiffVL, the first framework to reformulate visual localization as a GPS denoising task using diffusion models. Our key insight is that noisy GPS trajectory, when conditioned on visual BEV features and SD maps, implicitly encode the true pose distribution, which can be recovered through iterative diffusion refinement. DiffVL, unlike prior BEV-matching methods (e.g., OrienterNet) or transformer-based registration approaches, learns to reverse GPS noise perturbations by jointly modeling GPS, SD map, and visual signals, achieving sub-meter accuracy without relying on HD maps. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy compared to BEV-matching baselines. Crucially, our work proves that diffusion models can enable scalable localization by treating noisy GPS as a generative prior-making a paradigm shift from traditional matching-based methods.

BARISTA: Efficient and Scalable Serverless Serving System for Deep Learning Prediction Services

Pre-trained deep learning models are increasingly being used to offer a variety of compute-intensive predictive analytics services such as fitness tracking, speech and image recognition. The stateless and highly parallelizable nature of deep learning models makes them well-suited for serverless computing paradigm. However, making effective resource management decisions for these services is a hard problem due to the dynamic workloads and diverse set of available resource configurations that have their deployment and management costs. To address these challenges, we present a distributed and scalable deep-learning prediction serving system called Barista and make the following contributions. First, we present a fast and effective methodology for forecasting workloads by identifying various trends. Second, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the total cost incurred while ensuring bounded prediction latency with reasonable accuracy. Third, we propose an efficient heuristic to identify suitable compute resource configurations. Fourth, we propose an intelligent agent to allocate and manage the compute resources by horizontal and vertical scaling to maintain the required prediction latency. Finally, using representative real-world workloads for urban transportation service, we demonstrate and validate the capabilities of Barista.