On the Road with GPT-4V(ision): Early Explorations of Visual-Language Model on Autonomous Driving

The pursuit of autonomous driving technology hinges on the sophisticated integration of perception, decision-making, and control systems. Traditional approaches, both data-driven and rule-based, have been hindered by their inability to grasp the nuance of complex driving environments and the intentions of other road users. This has been a significant bottleneck, particularly in the development of common sense reasoning and nuanced scene understanding necessary for safe and reliable autonomous driving. The advent of Visual Language Models (VLM) represents a novel frontier in realizing fully autonomous vehicle driving. This report provides an exhaustive evaluation of the latest state-of-the-art VLM, GPT-4V(ision), and its application in autonomous driving scenarios. We explore the model's abilities to understand and reason about driving scenes, make decisions, and ultimately act in the capacity of a driver. Our comprehensive tests span from basic scene recognition to complex causal reasoning and real-time decision-making under varying conditions. Our findings reveal that GPT-4V demonstrates superior performance in scene understanding and causal reasoning compared to existing autonomous systems. It showcases the potential to handle out-of-distribution scenarios, recognize intentions, and make informed decisions in real driving contexts. However, challenges remain, particularly in direction discernment, traffic light recognition, vision grounding, and spatial reasoning tasks. These limitations underscore the need for further research and development. Project is now available on GitHub for interested parties to access and utilize: \url{https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/GPT4V-AD-Exploration}

Manga109Dialog A Large-scale Dialogue Dataset for Comics Speaker Detection

The expanding market for e-comics has spurred interest in the development of automated methods to analyze comics. For further understanding of comics, an automated approach is needed to link text in comics to characters speaking the words. Comics speaker detection research has practical applications, such as automatic character assignment for audiobooks, automatic translation according to characters' personalities, and inference of character relationships and stories. To deal with the problem of insufficient speaker-to-text annotations, we created a new annotation dataset Manga109Dialog based on Manga109. Manga109Dialog is the world's largest comics speaker annotation dataset, containing 132,692 speaker-to-text pairs. We further divided our dataset into different levels by prediction difficulties to evaluate speaker detection methods more appropriately. Unlike existing methods mainly based on distances, we propose a deep learning-based method using scene graph generation models. Due to the unique features of comics, we enhance the performance of our proposed model by considering the frame reading order. We conducted experiments using Manga109Dialog and other datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our scene-graph-based approach outperforms existing methods, achieving a prediction accuracy of over 75%.