Local map Construction Methods with SD map: A Novel Survey

In recent years, significant academic advancements have been made in the field of autonomous vehicles, with Local maps emerging as a crucial component of autonomous driving technology. Local maps not only provide intricate details of road networks but also serve as fundamental inputs for critical tasks such as vehicle localization, navigation, and decision-making. Given the characteristics of SD map (Standard Definition Map), which include low cost, ease of acquisition, and high versatility, perception methods that integrate SD map as prior information have demonstrated significant potential in the field of Local map perception. The purpose of this paper is to provide researchers with a comprehensive overview and summary of the latest advancements in the integration of SD map as prior information for Local map perception methods. This review begins by introducing the task definition and general pipeline of local map perception methods that incorporate SD maps as prior information, along with relevant public datasets. And then it focuses on the representation and encoding methods of multi-source information, as well as the methods for fusing multi-source information. In response to this burgeoning trend, this article presents a comprehensive and meticulous overview of the diverse research efforts in this particular field. Finally, the article addresses pertinent issues and future challenges with the aim of guiding researchers in understanding the current trends and methodologies prevalent in the field.

OE-BevSeg: An Object Informed and Environment Aware Multimodal Framework for Bird's-eye-view Vehicle Semantic Segmentation

Bird's-eye-view (BEV) semantic segmentation is becoming crucial in autonomous driving systems. It realizes ego-vehicle surrounding environment perception by projecting 2D multi-view images into 3D world space. Recently, BEV segmentation has made notable progress, attributed to better view transformation modules, larger image encoders, or more temporal information. However, there are still two issues: 1) a lack of effective understanding and enhancement of BEV space features, particularly in accurately capturing long-distance environmental features and 2) recognizing fine details of target objects. To address these issues, we propose OE-BevSeg, an end-to-end multimodal framework that enhances BEV segmentation performance through global environment-aware perception and local target object enhancement. OE-BevSeg employs an environment-aware BEV compressor. Based on prior knowledge about the main composition of the BEV surrounding environment varying with the increase of distance intervals, long-sequence global modeling is utilized to improve the model's understanding and perception of the environment. From the perspective of enriching target object information in segmentation results, we introduce the center-informed object enhancement module, using centerness information to supervise and guide the segmentation head, thereby enhancing segmentation performance from a local enhancement perspective. Additionally, we designed a multimodal fusion branch that integrates multi-view RGB image features with radar/LiDAR features, achieving significant performance improvements. Extensive experiments show that, whether in camera-only or multimodal fusion BEV segmentation tasks, our approach achieves state-of-the-art results by a large margin on the nuScenes dataset for vehicle segmentation, demonstrating superior applicability in the field of autonomous driving.

Hierarchical and Decoupled BEV Perception Learning Framework for Autonomous Driving

Perception is essential for autonomous driving system. Recent approaches based on Bird's-eye-view (BEV) and deep learning have made significant progress. However, there exists challenging issues including lengthy development cycles, poor reusability, and complex sensor setups in perception algorithm development process. To tackle the above challenges, this paper proposes a novel hierarchical Bird's-eye-view (BEV) perception paradigm, aiming to provide a library of fundamental perception modules and user-friendly graphical interface, enabling swift construction of customized models. We conduct the Pretrain-Finetune strategy to effectively utilize large scale public datasets and streamline development processes. Specifically, we present a Multi-Module Learning (MML) approach, enhancing performance through synergistic and iterative training of multiple models. Extensive experimental results on the Nuscenes dataset demonstrate that our approach renders significant improvement over the traditional training method.

AMSNet: Netlist Dataset for AMS Circuits

Today's analog/mixed-signal (AMS) integrated circuit (IC) designs demand substantial manual intervention. The advent of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has unveiled significant potential across various fields, suggesting their applicability in streamlining large-scale AMS IC design as well. A bottleneck in employing MLLMs for automatic AMS circuit generation is the absence of a comprehensive dataset delineating the schematic-netlist relationship. We therefore design an automatic technique for converting schematics into netlists, and create dataset AMSNet, encompassing transistor-level schematics and corresponding SPICE format netlists. With a growing size, AMSNet can significantly facilitate exploration of MLLM applications in AMS circuit design. We have made an initial set of netlists public, and will make both our netlist generation tool and the full dataset available upon publishing of this paper.

DenserRadar: A 4D millimeter-wave radar point cloud detector based on dense LiDAR point clouds

The 4D millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar, with its robustness in extreme environments, extensive detection range, and capabilities for measuring velocity and elevation, has demonstrated significant potential for enhancing the perception abilities of autonomous driving systems in corner-case scenarios. Nevertheless, the inherent sparsity and noise of 4D mmWave radar point clouds restrict its further development and practical application. In this paper, we introduce a novel 4D mmWave radar point cloud detector, which leverages high-resolution dense LiDAR point clouds. Our approach constructs dense 3D occupancy ground truth from stitched LiDAR point clouds, and employs a specially designed network named DenserRadar. The proposed method surpasses existing probability-based and learning-based radar point cloud detectors in terms of both point cloud density and accuracy on the K-Radar dataset.

Feature Map Convergence Evaluation for Functional Module

Autonomous driving perception models are typically composed of multiple functional modules that interact through complex relationships to accomplish environment understanding. However, perception models are predominantly optimized as a black box through end-to-end training, lacking independent evaluation of functional modules, which poses difficulties for interpretability and optimization. Pioneering in the issue, we propose an evaluation method based on feature map analysis to gauge the convergence of model, thereby assessing functional modules' training maturity. We construct a quantitative metric named as the Feature Map Convergence Score (FMCS) and develop Feature Map Convergence Evaluation Network (FMCE-Net) to measure and predict the convergence degree of models respectively. FMCE-Net achieves remarkable predictive accuracy for FMCS across multiple image classification experiments, validating the efficacy and robustness of the introduced approach. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first independent evaluation method for functional modules, offering a new paradigm for the training assessment towards perception models.

Neural Radiance Field in Autonomous Driving: A Survey

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has garnered significant attention from both academia and industry due to its intrinsic advantages, particularly its implicit representation and novel view synthesis capabilities. With the rapid advancements in deep learning, a multitude of methods have emerged to explore the potential applications of NeRF in the domain of Autonomous Driving (AD). However, a conspicuous void is apparent within the current literature. To bridge this gap, this paper conducts a comprehensive survey of NeRF's applications in the context of AD. Our survey is structured to categorize NeRF's applications in Autonomous Driving (AD), specifically encompassing perception, 3D reconstruction, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and simulation. We delve into in-depth analysis and summarize the findings for each application category, and conclude by providing insights and discussions on future directions in this field. We hope this paper serves as a comprehensive reference for researchers in this domain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey specifically focused on the applications of NeRF in the Autonomous Driving domain.

CoVoMix: Advancing Zero-Shot Speech Generation for Human-like Multi-talker Conversations

Recent advancements in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) modeling have led to significant strides in generating high-fidelity and diverse speech. However, dialogue generation, along with achieving human-like naturalness in speech, continues to be a challenge in the field. In this paper, we introduce CoVoMix: Conversational Voice Mixture Generation, a novel model for zero-shot, human-like, multi-speaker, multi-round dialogue speech generation. CoVoMix is capable of first converting dialogue text into multiple streams of discrete tokens, with each token stream representing semantic information for individual talkers. These token streams are then fed into a flow-matching based acoustic model to generate mixed mel-spectrograms. Finally, the speech waveforms are produced using a HiFi-GAN model. Furthermore, we devise a comprehensive set of metrics for measuring the effectiveness of dialogue modeling and generation. Our experimental results show that CoVoMix can generate dialogues that are not only human-like in their naturalness and coherence but also involve multiple talkers engaging in multiple rounds of conversation. These dialogues, generated within a single channel, are characterized by seamless speech transitions, including overlapping speech, and appropriate paralinguistic behaviors such as laughter. Audio samples are available at https://aka.ms/covomix.

T-Mamba: Frequency-Enhanced Gated Long-Range Dependency for Tooth 3D CBCT Segmentation

Efficient tooth segmentation in three-dimensional (3D) imaging, critical for orthodontic diagnosis, remains challenging due to noise, low contrast, and artifacts in CBCT images. Both convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and transformers have emerged as popular architectures for image segmentation. However, their efficacy in handling long-range dependencies is limited due to inherent locality or computational complexity. To address this issue, we propose T-Mamba, integrating shared positional encoding and frequency-based features into vision mamba, to address limitations in spatial position preservation and feature enhancement in frequency domain. Besides, we also design a gate selection unit to integrate two features in spatial domain and one feature in frequency domain adaptively. T-Mamba is the first work to introduce frequency-based features into vision mamba. Extensive experiments demonstrate that T-Mamba achieves new SOTA results on the public Tooth CBCT dataset and outperforms previous SOTA methods by a large margin, i.e., IoU + 3.63%, SO + 2.43%, DSC +2.30%, HD -4.39mm, and ASSD -0.37mm. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/isbrycee/T-Mamba.

NaturalSpeech 3: Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis with Factorized Codec and Diffusion Models

While recent large-scale text-to-speech (TTS) models have achieved significant progress, they still fall short in speech quality, similarity, and prosody. Considering speech intricately encompasses various attributes (e.g., content, prosody, timbre, and acoustic details) that pose significant challenges for generation, a natural idea is to factorize speech into individual subspaces representing different attributes and generate them individually. Motivated by it, we propose NaturalSpeech 3, a TTS system with novel factorized diffusion models to generate natural speech in a zero-shot way. Specifically, 1) we design a neural codec with factorized vector quantization (FVQ) to disentangle speech waveform into subspaces of content, prosody, timbre, and acoustic details; 2) we propose a factorized diffusion model to generate attributes in each subspace following its corresponding prompt. With this factorization design, NaturalSpeech 3 can effectively and efficiently model the intricate speech with disentangled subspaces in a divide-and-conquer way. Experiments show that NaturalSpeech 3 outperforms the state-of-the-art TTS systems on quality, similarity, prosody, and intelligibility. Furthermore, we achieve better performance by scaling to 1B parameters and 200K hours of training data.