PhysBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Vision-Language Models for Physical World Understanding

Understanding the physical world is a fundamental challenge in embodied AI, critical for enabling agents to perform complex tasks and operate safely in real-world environments. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown great promise in reasoning and task planning for embodied agents, their ability to comprehend physical phenomena remains extremely limited. To close this gap, we introduce PhysBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs' physical world understanding capability across a diverse set of tasks. PhysBench contains 10,002 entries of interleaved video-image-text data, categorized into four major domains: physical object properties, physical object relationships, physical scene understanding, and physics-based dynamics, further divided into 19 subclasses and 8 distinct capability dimensions. Our extensive experiments, conducted on 75 representative VLMs, reveal that while these models excel in common-sense reasoning, they struggle with understanding the physical world -- likely due to the absence of physical knowledge in their training data and the lack of embedded physical priors. To tackle the shortfall, we introduce PhysAgent, a novel framework that combines the generalization strengths of VLMs with the specialized expertise of vision models, significantly enhancing VLMs' physical understanding across a variety of tasks, including an 18.4\% improvement on GPT-4o. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that enhancing VLMs' physical world understanding capabilities can help embodied agents such as MOKA. We believe that PhysBench and PhysAgent offer valuable insights and contribute to bridging the gap between VLMs and physical world understanding.

DreamDrive: Generative 4D Scene Modeling from Street View Images

Synthesizing photo-realistic visual observations from an ego vehicle's driving trajectory is a critical step towards scalable training of self-driving models. Reconstruction-based methods create 3D scenes from driving logs and synthesize geometry-consistent driving videos through neural rendering, but their dependence on costly object annotations limits their ability to generalize to in-the-wild driving scenarios. On the other hand, generative models can synthesize action-conditioned driving videos in a more generalizable way but often struggle with maintaining 3D visual consistency. In this paper, we present DreamDrive, a 4D spatial-temporal scene generation approach that combines the merits of generation and reconstruction, to synthesize generalizable 4D driving scenes and dynamic driving videos with 3D consistency. Specifically, we leverage the generative power of video diffusion models to synthesize a sequence of visual references and further elevate them to 4D with a novel hybrid Gaussian representation. Given a driving trajectory, we then render 3D-consistent driving videos via Gaussian splatting. The use of generative priors allows our method to produce high-quality 4D scenes from in-the-wild driving data, while neural rendering ensures 3D-consistent video generation from the 4D scenes. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and street view images demonstrate that DreamDrive can generate controllable and generalizable 4D driving scenes, synthesize novel views of driving videos with high fidelity and 3D consistency, decompose static and dynamic elements in a self-supervised manner, and enhance perception and planning tasks for autonomous driving.

Learning from Massive Human Videos for Universal Humanoid Pose Control

Scalable learning of humanoid robots is crucial for their deployment in real-world applications. While traditional approaches primarily rely on reinforcement learning or teleoperation to achieve whole-body control, they are often limited by the diversity of simulated environments and the high costs of demonstration collection. In contrast, human videos are ubiquitous and present an untapped source of semantic and motion information that could significantly enhance the generalization capabilities of humanoid robots. This paper introduces Humanoid-X, a large-scale dataset of over 20 million humanoid robot poses with corresponding text-based motion descriptions, designed to leverage this abundant data. Humanoid-X is curated through a comprehensive pipeline: data mining from the Internet, video caption generation, motion retargeting of humans to humanoid robots, and policy learning for real-world deployment. With Humanoid-X, we further train a large humanoid model, UH-1, which takes text instructions as input and outputs corresponding actions to control a humanoid robot. Extensive simulated and real-world experiments validate that our scalable training approach leads to superior generalization in text-based humanoid control, marking a significant step toward adaptable, real-world-ready humanoid robots.

RAM: Retrieval-Based Affordance Transfer for Generalizable Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation

This work proposes a retrieve-and-transfer framework for zero-shot robotic manipulation, dubbed RAM, featuring generalizability across various objects, environments, and embodiments. Unlike existing approaches that learn manipulation from expensive in-domain demonstrations, RAM capitalizes on a retrieval-based affordance transfer paradigm to acquire versatile manipulation capabilities from abundant out-of-domain data. First, RAM extracts unified affordance at scale from diverse sources of demonstrations including robotic data, human-object interaction (HOI) data, and custom data to construct a comprehensive affordance memory. Then given a language instruction, RAM hierarchically retrieves the most similar demonstration from the affordance memory and transfers such out-of-domain 2D affordance to in-domain 3D executable affordance in a zero-shot and embodiment-agnostic manner. Extensive simulation and real-world evaluations demonstrate that our RAM consistently outperforms existing works in diverse daily tasks. Additionally, RAM shows significant potential for downstream applications such as automatic and efficient data collection, one-shot visual imitation, and LLM/VLM-integrated long-horizon manipulation. For more details, please check our website at https://yxkryptonite.github.io/RAM/.

DeTra: A Unified Model for Object Detection and Trajectory Forecasting

The tasks of object detection and trajectory forecasting play a crucial role in understanding the scene for autonomous driving. These tasks are typically executed in a cascading manner, making them prone to compounding errors. Furthermore, there is usually a very thin interface between the two tasks, creating a lossy information bottleneck. To address these challenges, our approach formulates the union of the two tasks as a trajectory refinement problem, where the first pose is the detection (current time), and the subsequent poses are the waypoints of the multiple forecasts (future time). To tackle this unified task, we design a refinement transformer that infers the presence, pose, and multi-modal future behaviors of objects directly from LiDAR point clouds and high-definition maps. We call this model DeTra, short for object Detection and Trajectory forecasting. In our experiments, we observe that \ourmodel{} outperforms the state-of-the-art on Argoverse 2 Sensor and Waymo Open Dataset by a large margin, across a broad range of metrics. Last but not least, we perform extensive ablation studies that show the value of refinement for this task, that every proposed component contributes positively to its performance, and that key design choices were made.

Driving Everywhere with Large Language Model Policy Adaptation

Adapting driving behavior to new environments, customs, and laws is a long-standing problem in autonomous driving, precluding the widespread deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs). In this paper, we present LLaDA, a simple yet powerful tool that enables human drivers and autonomous vehicles alike to drive everywhere by adapting their tasks and motion plans to traffic rules in new locations. LLaDA achieves this by leveraging the impressive zero-shot generalizability of large language models (LLMs) in interpreting the traffic rules in the local driver handbook. Through an extensive user study, we show that LLaDA's instructions are useful in disambiguating in-the-wild unexpected situations. We also demonstrate LLaDA's ability to adapt AV motion planning policies in real-world datasets; LLaDA outperforms baseline planning approaches on all our metrics. Please check our website for more details: https://boyiliee.github.io/llada.

A Language Agent for Autonomous Driving

Human-level driving is an ultimate goal of autonomous driving. Conventional approaches formulate autonomous driving as a perception-prediction-planning framework, yet their systems do not capitalize on the inherent reasoning ability and experiential knowledge of humans. In this paper, we propose a fundamental paradigm shift from current pipelines, exploiting Large Language Models (LLMs) as a cognitive agent to integrate human-like intelligence into autonomous driving systems. Our approach, termed Agent-Driver, transforms the traditional autonomous driving pipeline by introducing a versatile tool library accessible via function calls, a cognitive memory of common sense and experiential knowledge for decision-making, and a reasoning engine capable of chain-of-thought reasoning, task planning, motion planning, and self-reflection. Powered by LLMs, our Agent-Driver is endowed with intuitive common sense and robust reasoning capabilities, thus enabling a more nuanced, human-like approach to autonomous driving. We evaluate our approach on the large-scale nuScenes benchmark, and extensive experiments substantiate that our Agent-Driver significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art driving methods by a large margin. Our approach also demonstrates superior interpretability and few-shot learning ability to these methods. Code will be released.

GPT-Driver: Learning to Drive with GPT

We present a simple yet effective approach that can transform the OpenAI GPT-3.5 model into a reliable motion planner for autonomous vehicles. Motion planning is a core challenge in autonomous driving, aiming to plan a driving trajectory that is safe and comfortable. Existing motion planners predominantly leverage heuristic methods to forecast driving trajectories, yet these approaches demonstrate insufficient generalization capabilities in the face of novel and unseen driving scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to motion planning that capitalizes on the strong reasoning capabilities and generalization potential inherent to Large Language Models (LLMs). The fundamental insight of our approach is the reformulation of motion planning as a language modeling problem, a perspective not previously explored. Specifically, we represent the planner inputs and outputs as language tokens, and leverage the LLM to generate driving trajectories through a language description of coordinate positions. Furthermore, we propose a novel prompting-reasoning-finetuning strategy to stimulate the numerical reasoning potential of the LLM. With this strategy, the LLM can describe highly precise trajectory coordinates and also its internal decision-making process in natural language. We evaluate our approach on the large-scale nuScenes dataset, and extensive experiments substantiate the effectiveness, generalization ability, and interpretability of our GPT-based motion planner. Code is now available at https://github.com/PointsCoder/GPT-Driver.

CLIP$^2$: Contrastive Language-Image-Point Pretraining from Real-World Point Cloud Data

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training, benefiting from large-scale unlabeled text-image pairs, has demonstrated great performance in open-world vision understanding tasks. However, due to the limited Text-3D data pairs, adapting the success of 2D Vision-Language Models (VLM) to the 3D space remains an open problem. Existing works that leverage VLM for 3D understanding generally resort to constructing intermediate 2D representations for the 3D data, but at the cost of losing 3D geometry information. To take a step toward open-world 3D vision understanding, we propose Contrastive Language-Image-Point Cloud Pretraining (CLIP$^2$) to directly learn the transferable 3D point cloud representation in realistic scenarios with a novel proxy alignment mechanism. Specifically, we exploit naturally-existed correspondences in 2D and 3D scenarios, and build well-aligned and instance-based text-image-point proxies from those complex scenarios. On top of that, we propose a cross-modal contrastive objective to learn semantic and instance-level aligned point cloud representation. Experimental results on both indoor and outdoor scenarios show that our learned 3D representation has great transfer ability in downstream tasks, including zero-shot and few-shot 3D recognition, which boosts the state-of-the-art methods by large margins. Furthermore, we provide analyses of the capability of different representations in real scenarios and present the optional ensemble scheme.

3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving: A Review and New Outlooks

Autonomous driving, in recent years, has been receiving increasing attention for its potential to relieve drivers' burdens and improve the safety of driving. In modern autonomous driving pipelines, the perception system is an indispensable component, aiming to accurately estimate the status of surrounding environments and provide reliable observations for prediction and planning. 3D object detection, which intelligently predicts the locations, sizes, and categories of the critical 3D objects near an autonomous vehicle, is an important part of a perception system. This paper reviews the advances in 3D object detection for autonomous driving. First, we introduce the background of 3D object detection and discuss the challenges in this task. Second, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the progress in 3D object detection from the aspects of models and sensory inputs, including LiDAR-based, camera-based, and multi-modal detection approaches. We also provide an in-depth analysis of the potentials and challenges in each category of methods. Additionally, we systematically investigate the applications of 3D object detection in driving systems. Finally, we conduct a performance analysis of the 3D object detection approaches, and we further summarize the research trends over the years and prospect the future directions of this area.