S2R-Bench: A Sim-to-Real Evaluation Benchmark for Autonomous Driving

Safety is a long-standing and the final pursuit in the development of autonomous driving systems, with a significant portion of safety challenge arising from perception. How to effectively evaluate the safety as well as the reliability of perception algorithms is becoming an emerging issue. Despite its critical importance, existing perception methods exhibit a limitation in their robustness, primarily due to the use of benchmarks are entierly simulated, which fail to align predicted results with actual outcomes, particularly under extreme weather conditions and sensor anomalies that are prevalent in real-world scenarios. To fill this gap, in this study, we propose a Sim-to-Real Evaluation Benchmark for Autonomous Driving (S2R-Bench). We collect diverse sensor anomaly data under various road conditions to evaluate the robustness of autonomous driving perception methods in a comprehensive and realistic manner. This is the first corruption robustness benchmark based on real-world scenarios, encompassing various road conditions, weather conditions, lighting intensities, and time periods. By comparing real-world data with simulated data, we demonstrate the reliability and practical significance of the collected data for real-world applications. We hope that this dataset will advance future research and contribute to the development of more robust perception models for autonomous driving. This dataset is released on https://github.com/adept-thu/S2R-Bench.

DSADF: Thinking Fast and Slow for Decision Making

Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents are effective in well-defined environments, they often struggle to generalize their learned policies to dynamic settings due to their reliance on trial-and-error interactions. Recent work has explored applying Large Language Models (LLMs) or Vision Language Models (VLMs) to boost the generalization of RL agents through policy optimization guidance or prior knowledge. However, these approaches often lack seamless coordination between the RL agent and the foundation model, leading to unreasonable decision-making in unfamiliar environments and efficiency bottlenecks. Making full use of the inferential capabilities of foundation models and the rapid response capabilities of RL agents and enhancing the interaction between the two to form a dual system is still a lingering scientific question. To address this problem, we draw inspiration from Kahneman's theory of fast thinking (System 1) and slow thinking (System 2), demonstrating that balancing intuition and deep reasoning can achieve nimble decision-making in a complex world. In this study, we propose a Dual-System Adaptive Decision Framework (DSADF), integrating two complementary modules: System 1, comprising an RL agent and a memory space for fast and intuitive decision making, and System 2, driven by a VLM for deep and analytical reasoning. DSADF facilitates efficient and adaptive decision-making by combining the strengths of both systems. The empirical study in the video game environment: Crafter and Housekeep demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method, showing significant improvements in decision abilities for both unseen and known tasks.

Token Statistics Transformer: Linear-Time Attention via Variational Rate Reduction

The attention operator is arguably the key distinguishing factor of transformer architectures, which have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on a variety of tasks. However, transformer attention operators often impose a significant computational burden, with the computational complexity scaling quadratically with the number of tokens. In this work, we propose a novel transformer attention operator whose computational complexity scales linearly with the number of tokens. We derive our network architecture by extending prior work which has shown that a transformer style architecture naturally arises by "white-box" architecture design, where each layer of the network is designed to implement an incremental optimization step of a maximal coding rate reduction objective (MCR$^2$). Specifically, we derive a novel variational form of the MCR$^2$ objective and show that the architecture that results from unrolled gradient descent of this variational objective leads to a new attention module called Token Statistics Self-Attention (TSSA). TSSA has linear computational and memory complexity and radically departs from the typical attention architecture that computes pairwise similarities between tokens. Experiments on vision, language, and long sequence tasks show that simply swapping TSSA for standard self-attention, which we refer to as the Token Statistics Transformer (ToST), achieves competitive performance with conventional transformers while being significantly more computationally efficient and interpretable. Our results also somewhat call into question the conventional wisdom that pairwise similarity style attention mechanisms are critical to the success of transformer architectures. Code will be available at https://github.com/RobinWu218/ToST.

Critic-V: VLM Critics Help Catch VLM Errors in Multimodal Reasoning

Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown remarkable advancements in multimodal reasoning tasks. However, they still often generate inaccurate or irrelevant responses due to issues like hallucinated image understandings or unrefined reasoning paths. To address these challenges, we introduce Critic-V, a novel framework inspired by the Actor-Critic paradigm to boost the reasoning capability of VLMs. This framework decouples the reasoning process and critic process by integrating two independent components: the Reasoner, which generates reasoning paths based on visual and textual inputs, and the Critic, which provides constructive critique to refine these paths. In this approach, the Reasoner generates reasoning responses according to text prompts, which can evolve iteratively as a policy based on feedback from the Critic. This interaction process was theoretically driven by a reinforcement learning framework where the Critic offers natural language critiques instead of scalar rewards, enabling more nuanced feedback to boost the Reasoner's capability on complex reasoning tasks. The Critic model is trained using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), leveraging a preference dataset of critiques ranked by Rule-based Reward~(RBR) to enhance its critic capabilities. Evaluation results show that the Critic-V framework significantly outperforms existing methods, including GPT-4V, on 5 out of 8 benchmarks, especially regarding reasoning accuracy and efficiency. Combining a dynamic text-based policy for the Reasoner and constructive feedback from the preference-optimized Critic enables a more reliable and context-sensitive multimodal reasoning process. Our approach provides a promising solution to enhance the reliability of VLMs, improving their performance in real-world reasoning-heavy multimodal applications such as autonomous driving and embodied intelligence.

Ctrl123: Consistent Novel View Synthesis via Closed-Loop Transcription

Large image diffusion models have demonstrated zero-shot capability in novel view synthesis (NVS). However, existing diffusion-based NVS methods struggle to generate novel views that are accurately consistent with the corresponding ground truth poses and appearances, even on the training set. This consequently limits the performance of downstream tasks, such as image-to-multiview generation and 3D reconstruction. We realize that such inconsistency is largely due to the fact that it is difficult to enforce accurate pose and appearance alignment directly in the diffusion training, as mostly done by existing methods such as Zero123. To remedy this problem, we propose Ctrl123, a closed-loop transcription-based NVS diffusion method that enforces alignment between the generated view and ground truth in a pose-sensitive feature space. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Ctrl123 on the tasks of NVS and 3D reconstruction, achieving significant improvements in both multiview-consistency and pose-consistency over existing methods.

FaceChain-ImagineID: Freely Crafting High-Fidelity Diverse Talking Faces from Disentangled Audio

In this paper, we abstract the process of people hearing speech, extracting meaningful cues, and creating various dynamically audio-consistent talking faces, termed Listening and Imagining, into the task of high-fidelity diverse talking faces generation from a single audio. Specifically, it involves two critical challenges: one is to effectively decouple identity, content, and emotion from entangled audio, and the other is to maintain intra-video diversity and inter-video consistency. To tackle the issues, we first dig out the intricate relationships among facial factors and simplify the decoupling process, tailoring a Progressive Audio Disentanglement for accurate facial geometry and semantics learning, where each stage incorporates a customized training module responsible for a specific factor. Secondly, to achieve visually diverse and audio-synchronized animation solely from input audio within a single model, we introduce the Controllable Coherent Frame generation, which involves the flexible integration of three trainable adapters with frozen Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) to focus on maintaining facial geometry and semantics, as well as texture and temporal coherence between frames. In this way, we inherit high-quality diverse generation from LDMs while significantly improving their controllability at a low training cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of our method in handling this paradigm. The codes will be released at https://github.com/modelscope/facechain.

H-ensemble: An Information Theoretic Approach to Reliable Few-Shot Multi-Source-Free Transfer

Multi-source transfer learning is an effective solution to data scarcity by utilizing multiple source tasks for the learning of the target task. However, access to source data and model details is limited in the era of commercial models, giving rise to the setting of multi-source-free (MSF) transfer learning that aims to leverage source domain knowledge without such access. As a newly defined problem paradigm, MSF transfer learning remains largely underexplored and not clearly formulated. In this work, we adopt an information theoretic perspective on it and propose a framework named H-ensemble, which dynamically learns the optimal linear combination, or ensemble, of source models for the target task, using a generalization of maximal correlation regression. The ensemble weights are optimized by maximizing an information theoretic metric for transferability. Compared to previous works, H-ensemble is characterized by: 1) its adaptability to a novel and realistic MSF setting for few-shot target tasks, 2) theoretical reliability, 3) a lightweight structure easy to interpret and adapt. Our method is empirically validated by ablation studies, along with extensive comparative analysis with other task ensemble and transfer learning methods. We show that the H-ensemble can successfully learn the optimal task ensemble, as well as outperform prior arts.

Legal Decision-making for Highway Automated Driving

Compliance with traffic laws is a fundamental requirement for human drivers on the road, and autonomous vehicles must adhere to traffic laws as well. However, current autonomous vehicles prioritize safety and collision avoidance primarily in their decision-making and planning, which will lead to misunderstandings and distrust from human drivers and may even result in accidents in mixed traffic flow. Therefore, ensuring the compliance of the autonomous driving decision-making system is essential for ensuring the safety of autonomous driving and promoting the widespread adoption of autonomous driving technology. To this end, the paper proposes a trigger-based layered compliance decision-making framework. This framework utilizes the decision intent at the highest level as a signal to activate an online violation monitor that identifies the type of violation committed by the vehicle. Then, a four-layer architecture for compliance decision-making is employed to generate compliantly trajectories. Using this system, autonomous vehicles can detect and correct potential violations in real-time, thereby enhancing safety and building public confidence in autonomous driving technology. Finally, the proposed method is evaluated on the DJI AD4CHE highway dataset under four typical highway scenarios: speed limit, following distance, overtaking, and lane-changing. The results indicate that the proposed method increases the vehicle's overall compliance rate from 13.85% to 84.46%, while reducing the proportion of active violations to 0%, demonstrating its effectiveness.

How Does Traffic Environment Quantitatively Affect the Autonomous Driving Prediction?

An accurate trajectory prediction is crucial for safe and efficient autonomous driving in complex traffic environments. In recent years, artificial intelligence has shown strong capabilities in improving prediction accuracy. However, its characteristics of inexplicability and uncertainty make it challenging to determine the traffic environmental effect on prediction explicitly, posing significant challenges to safety-critical decision-making. To address these challenges, this study proposes a trajectory prediction framework with the epistemic uncertainty estimation ability that outputs high uncertainty when confronting unforeseeable or unknown scenarios. The proposed framework is used to analyze the environmental effect on the prediction algorithm performance. In the analysis, the traffic environment is considered in terms of scenario features and shifts, respectively, where features are divided into kinematic features of a target agent, features of its surrounding traffic participants, and other features. In addition, feature correlation and importance analyses are performed to study the above features' influence on the prediction error and epistemic uncertainty. Further, a cross-dataset case study is conducted using multiple intersection datasets to investigate the impact of unavoidable distributional shifts in the real world on trajectory prediction. The results indicate that the deep ensemble-based method has advantages in improving prediction robustness and estimating epistemic uncertainty. The consistent conclusions are obtained by the feature correlation and importance analyses, including the conclusion that kinematic features of the target agent have relatively strong effects on the prediction error and epistemic uncertainty. Furthermore, the prediction failure caused by distributional shifts and the potential of the deep ensemble-based method are analyzed.

Survey on Source-coding technique

Shannon separation theorem lays the foundation for traditional image compression and transmission schemes, which consist of JPEG type image compression methods and the usual channel coding schemes such as Turbo and LDPC codes. One of the advantages of the separate design is that each of the two components, channel coding and source coding can be handled independently without considering the other, which is the base of decades-long technologies.