PlanAgent: A Multi-modal Large Language Agent for Closed-loop Vehicle Motion Planning

Vehicle motion planning is an essential component of autonomous driving technology. Current rule-based vehicle motion planning methods perform satisfactorily in common scenarios but struggle to generalize to long-tailed situations. Meanwhile, learning-based methods have yet to achieve superior performance over rule-based approaches in large-scale closed-loop scenarios. To address these issues, we propose PlanAgent, the first mid-to-mid planning system based on a Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM). MLLM is used as a cognitive agent to introduce human-like knowledge, interpretability, and common-sense reasoning into the closed-loop planning. Specifically, PlanAgent leverages the power of MLLM through three core modules. First, an Environment Transformation module constructs a Bird's Eye View (BEV) map and a lane-graph-based textual description from the environment as inputs. Second, a Reasoning Engine module introduces a hierarchical chain-of-thought from scene understanding to lateral and longitudinal motion instructions, culminating in planner code generation. Last, a Reflection module is integrated to simulate and evaluate the generated planner for reducing MLLM's uncertainty. PlanAgent is endowed with the common-sense reasoning and generalization capability of MLLM, which empowers it to effectively tackle both common and complex long-tailed scenarios. Our proposed PlanAgent is evaluated on the large-scale and challenging nuPlan benchmarks. A comprehensive set of experiments convincingly demonstrates that PlanAgent outperforms the existing state-of-the-art in the closed-loop motion planning task. Codes will be soon released.

MonoOcc: Digging into Monocular Semantic Occupancy Prediction

Monocular Semantic Occupancy Prediction aims to infer the complete 3D geometry and semantic information of scenes from only 2D images. It has garnered significant attention, particularly due to its potential to enhance the 3D perception of autonomous vehicles. However, existing methods rely on a complex cascaded framework with relatively limited information to restore 3D scenes, including a dependency on supervision solely on the whole network's output, single-frame input, and the utilization of a small backbone. These challenges, in turn, hinder the optimization of the framework and yield inferior prediction results, particularly concerning smaller and long-tailed objects. To address these issues, we propose MonoOcc. In particular, we (i) improve the monocular occupancy prediction framework by proposing an auxiliary semantic loss as supervision to the shallow layers of the framework and an image-conditioned cross-attention module to refine voxel features with visual clues, and (ii) employ a distillation module that transfers temporal information and richer knowledge from a larger image backbone to the monocular semantic occupancy prediction framework with low cost of hardware. With these advantages, our method yields state-of-the-art performance on the camera-based SemanticKITTI Scene Completion benchmark. Codes and models can be accessed at https://github.com/ucaszyp/MonoOcc

Planning-inspired Hierarchical Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving

Recently, anchor-based trajectory prediction methods have shown promising performance, which directly selects a final set of anchors as future intents in the spatio-temporal coupled space. However, such methods typically neglect a deeper semantic interpretation of path intents and suffer from inferior performance under the imperfect High-Definition (HD) map. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Planning-inspired Hierarchical (PiH) trajectory prediction framework that selects path and speed intents through a hierarchical lateral and longitudinal decomposition. Especially, a hybrid lateral predictor is presented to select a set of fixed-distance lateral paths from map-based road-following and cluster-based free-move path candidates. {Then, the subsequent longitudinal predictor selects plausible goals sampled from a set of lateral paths as speed intents.} Finally, a trajectory decoder is given to generate future trajectories conditioned on a categorical distribution over lateral-longitudinal intents. Experiments demonstrate that PiH achieves competitive and more balanced results against state-of-the-art methods on the Argoverse motion forecasting benchmark and has the strongest robustness under the imperfect HD map.

STEPS: Joint Self-supervised Nighttime Image Enhancement and Depth Estimation

Self-supervised depth estimation draws a lot of attention recently as it can promote the 3D sensing capabilities of self-driving vehicles. However, it intrinsically relies upon the photometric consistency assumption, which hardly holds during nighttime. Although various supervised nighttime image enhancement methods have been proposed, their generalization performance in challenging driving scenarios is not satisfactory. To this end, we propose the first method that jointly learns a nighttime image enhancer and a depth estimator, without using ground truth for either task. Our method tightly entangles two self-supervised tasks using a newly proposed uncertain pixel masking strategy. This strategy originates from the observation that nighttime images not only suffer from underexposed regions but also from overexposed regions. By fitting a bridge-shaped curve to the illumination map distribution, both regions are suppressed and two tasks are bridged naturally. We benchmark the method on two established datasets: nuScenes and RobotCar and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on both of them. Detailed ablations also reveal the mechanism of our proposal. Last but not least, to mitigate the problem of sparse ground truth of existing datasets, we provide a new photo-realistically enhanced nighttime dataset based upon CARLA. It brings meaningful new challenges to the community. Codes, data, and models are available at https://github.com/ucaszyp/STEPS.

Prototypical context-aware dynamics generalization for high-dimensional model-based reinforcement learning

The latent world model provides a promising way to learn policies in a compact latent space for tasks with high-dimensional observations, however, its generalization across diverse environments with unseen dynamics remains challenging. Although the recurrent structure utilized in current advances helps to capture local dynamics, modeling only state transitions without an explicit understanding of environmental context limits the generalization ability of the dynamics model. To address this issue, we propose a Prototypical Context-Aware Dynamics (ProtoCAD) model, which captures the local dynamics by time consistent latent context and enables dynamics generalization in high-dimensional control tasks. ProtoCAD extracts useful contextual information with the help of the prototypes clustered over batch and benefits model-based RL in two folds: 1) It utilizes a temporally consistent prototypical regularizer that encourages the prototype assignments produced for different time parts of the same latent trajectory to be temporally consistent instead of comparing the features; 2) A context representation is designed which combines both the projection embedding of latent states and aggregated prototypes and can significantly improve the dynamics generalization ability. Extensive experiments show that ProtoCAD surpasses existing methods in terms of dynamics generalization. Compared with the recurrent-based model RSSM, ProtoCAD delivers 13.2% and 26.7% better mean and median performance across all dynamics generalization tasks.

TrajGen: Generating Realistic and Diverse Trajectories with Reactive and Feasible Agent Behaviors for Autonomous Driving

Realistic and diverse simulation scenarios with reactive and feasible agent behaviors can be used for validation and verification of self-driving system performance without relying on expensive and time-consuming real-world testing. Existing simulators rely on heuristic-based behavior models for background vehicles, which cannot capture the complex interactive behaviors in real-world scenarios. To bridge the gap between simulation and the real world, we propose TrajGen, a two-stage trajectory generation framework, which can capture more realistic behaviors directly from human demonstration. In particular, TrajGen consists of the multi-modal trajectory prediction stage and the reinforcement learning based trajectory modification stage. In the first stage, we propose a novel auxiliary RouteLoss for the trajectory prediction model to generate multi-modal diverse trajectories in the drivable area. In the second stage, reinforcement learning is used to track the predicted trajectories while avoiding collisions, which can improve the feasibility of generated trajectories. In addition, we develop a data-driven simulator I-Sim that can be used to train reinforcement learning models in parallel based on naturalistic driving data. The vehicle model in I-Sim can guarantee that the generated trajectories by TrajGen satisfy vehicle kinematic constraints. Finally, we give comprehensive metrics to evaluate generated trajectories for simulation scenarios, which shows that TrajGen outperforms either trajectory prediction or inverse reinforcement learning in terms of fidelity, reactivity, feasibility, and diversity.

Multi-task Safe Reinforcement Learning for Navigating Intersections in Dense Traffic

Multi-task intersection navigation including the unprotected turning left, turning right, and going straight in dense traffic is still a challenging task for autonomous driving. For the human driver, the negotiation skill with other interactive vehicles is the key to guarantee safety and efficiency. However, it is hard to balance the safety and efficiency of the autonomous vehicle for multi-task intersection navigation. In this paper, we formulate a multi-task safe reinforcement learning with social attention to improve the safety and efficiency when interacting with other traffic participants. Specifically, the social attention module is used to focus on the states of negotiation vehicles. In addition, a safety layer is added to the multi-task reinforcement learning framework to guarantee safe negotiation. We compare the experiments in the simulator SUMO with abundant traffic flows and CARLA with high-fidelity vehicle models, which both show that the proposed algorithm can improve safety with consistent traffic efficiency for multi-task intersection navigation.

MORSE-STF: A Privacy Preserving Computation System

Privacy-preserving machine learning has become a popular area of research due to the increasing concern over data privacy. One way to achieve privacy-preserving machine learning is to use secure multi-party computation, where multiple distrusting parties can perform computations on data without revealing the data itself. We present Secure-TF, a privacy-preserving machine learning framework based on MPC. Our framework is able to support widely-used machine learning models such as logistic regression, fully-connected neural network, and convolutional neural network. We propose novel cryptographic protocols that has lower round complexity and less communication for computing sigmoid, ReLU, conv2D and there derivatives. All are central building blocks for modern machine learning models. With our more efficient protocols, our system is able to outperform previous state-of-the-art privacy-preserving machine learning framework in the WAN setting.

A Reinforcement Learning Benchmark for Autonomous Driving in Intersection Scenarios

In recent years, control under urban intersection scenarios becomes an emerging research topic. In such scenarios, the autonomous vehicle confronts complicated situations since it must deal with the interaction with social vehicles timely while obeying the traffic rules. Generally, the autonomous vehicle is supposed to avoid collisions while pursuing better efficiency. The existing work fails to provide a framework that emphasizes the integrity of the scenarios while being able to deploy and test reinforcement learning(RL) methods. Specifically, we propose a benchmark for training and testing RL-based autonomous driving agents in complex intersection scenarios, which is called RL-CIS. Then, a set of baselines are deployed consists of various algorithms. The test benchmark and baselines are to provide a fair and comprehensive training and testing platform for the study of RL for autonomous driving in the intersection scenario, advancing the progress of RL-based methods for intersection autonomous driving control. The code of our proposed framework can be found at https://github.com/liuyuqi123/ComplexUrbanScenarios.

Benchmarking Lane-changing Decision-making for Deep Reinforcement Learning

The development of autonomous driving has attracted extensive attention in recent years, and it is essential to evaluate the performance of autonomous driving. However, testing on the road is expensive and inefficient. Virtual testing is the primary way to validate and verify self-driving cars, and the basis of virtual testing is to build simulation scenarios. In this paper, we propose a training, testing, and evaluation pipeline for the lane-changing task from the perspective of deep reinforcement learning. First, we design lane change scenarios for training and testing, where the test scenarios include stochastic and deterministic parts. Then, we deploy a set of benchmarks consisting of learning and non-learning approaches. We train several state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning methods in the designed training scenarios and provide the benchmark metrics evaluation results of the trained models in the test scenarios. The designed lane-changing scenarios and benchmarks are both opened to provide a consistent experimental environment for the lane-changing task.