DriveNetBench: An Affordable and Configurable Single-Camera Benchmarking System for Autonomous Driving Networks

Validating autonomous driving neural networks often demands expensive equipment and complex setups, limiting accessibility for researchers and educators. We introduce DriveNetBench, an affordable and configurable benchmarking system designed to evaluate autonomous driving networks using a single-camera setup. Leveraging low-cost, off-the-shelf hardware, and a flexible software stack, DriveNetBench enables easy integration of various driving models, such as object detection and lane following, while ensuring standardized evaluation in real-world scenarios. Our system replicates common driving conditions and provides consistent, repeatable metrics for comparing network performance. Through preliminary experiments with representative vision models, we illustrate how DriveNetBench effectively measures inference speed and accuracy within a controlled test environment. The key contributions of this work include its affordability, its replicability through open-source software, and its seamless integration into existing workflows, making autonomous vehicle research more accessible.

FutureSightDrive: Thinking Visually with Spatio-Temporal CoT for Autonomous Driving

Visual language models (VLMs) have attracted increasing interest in autonomous driving due to their powerful reasoning capabilities. However, existing VLMs typically utilize discrete text Chain-of-Thought (CoT) tailored to the current scenario, which essentially represents highly abstract and symbolic compression of visual information, potentially leading to spatio-temporal relationship ambiguity and fine-grained information loss. Is autonomous driving better modeled on real-world simulation and imagination than on pure symbolic logic? In this paper, we propose a spatio-temporal CoT reasoning method that enables models to think visually. First, VLM serves as a world model to generate unified image frame for predicting future world states: where perception results (e.g., lane divider and 3D detection) represent the future spatial relationships, and ordinary future frame represent the temporal evolution relationships. This spatio-temporal CoT then serves as intermediate reasoning steps, enabling the VLM to function as an inverse dynamics model for trajectory planning based on current observations and future predictions. To implement visual generation in VLMs, we propose a unified pretraining paradigm integrating visual generation and understanding, along with a progressive visual CoT enhancing autoregressive image generation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, advancing autonomous driving towards visual reasoning.

Driving with Context: Online Map Matching for Complex Roads Using Lane Markings and Scenario Recognition

Accurate online map matching is fundamental to vehicle navigation and the activation of intelligent driving functions. Current online map matching methods are prone to errors in complex road networks, especially in multilevel road area. To address this challenge, we propose an online Standard Definition (SD) map matching method by constructing a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with multiple probability factors. Our proposed method can achieve accurate map matching even in complex road networks by carefully leveraging lane markings and scenario recognition in the designing of the probability factors. First, the lane markings are generated by a multi-lane tracking method and associated with the SD map using HMM to build an enriched SD map. In areas covered by the enriched SD map, the vehicle can re-localize itself by performing Iterative Closest Point (ICP) registration for the lane markings. Then, the probability factor accounting for the lane marking detection can be obtained using the association probability between adjacent lanes and roads. Second, the driving scenario recognition model is applied to generate the emission probability factor of scenario recognition, which improves the performance of map matching on elevated roads and ordinary urban roads underneath them. We validate our method through extensive road tests in Europe and China, and the experimental results show that our proposed method effectively improves the online map matching accuracy as compared to other existing methods, especially in multilevel road area. Specifically, the experiments show that our proposed method achieves $F_1$ scores of 98.04% and 94.60% on the Zenseact Open Dataset and test data of multilevel road areas in Shanghai respectively, significantly outperforming benchmark methods. The implementation is available at https://github.com/TRV-Lab/LMSR-OMM.

DIFFUMA: High-Fidelity Spatio-Temporal Video Prediction via Dual-Path Mamba and Diffusion Enhancement

Spatio-temporal video prediction plays a pivotal role in critical domains, ranging from weather forecasting to industrial automation. However, in high-precision industrial scenarios such as semiconductor manufacturing, the absence of specialized benchmark datasets severely hampers research on modeling and predicting complex processes. To address this challenge, we make a twofold contribution.First, we construct and release the Chip Dicing Lane Dataset (CHDL), the first public temporal image dataset dedicated to the semiconductor wafer dicing process. Captured via an industrial-grade vision system, CHDL provides a much-needed and challenging benchmark for high-fidelity process modeling, defect detection, and digital twin development.Second, we propose DIFFUMA, an innovative dual-path prediction architecture specifically designed for such fine-grained dynamics. The model captures global long-range temporal context through a parallel Mamba module, while simultaneously leveraging a diffusion module, guided by temporal features, to restore and enhance fine-grained spatial details, effectively combating feature degradation. Experiments demonstrate that on our CHDL benchmark, DIFFUMA significantly outperforms existing methods, reducing the Mean Squared Error (MSE) by 39% and improving the Structural Similarity (SSIM) from 0.926 to a near-perfect 0.988. This superior performance also generalizes to natural phenomena datasets. Our work not only delivers a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) model but, more importantly, provides the community with an invaluable data resource to drive future research in industrial AI.

Advancing Autonomous Vehicle Intelligence: Deep Learning and Multimodal LLM for Traffic Sign Recognition and Robust Lane Detection

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) require reliable traffic sign recognition and robust lane detection capabilities to ensure safe navigation in complex and dynamic environments. This paper introduces an integrated approach combining advanced deep learning techniques and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for comprehensive road perception. For traffic sign recognition, we systematically evaluate ResNet-50, YOLOv8, and RT-DETR, achieving state-of-the-art performance of 99.8% with ResNet-50, 98.0% accuracy with YOLOv8, and achieved 96.6% accuracy in RT-DETR despite its higher computational complexity. For lane detection, we propose a CNN-based segmentation method enhanced by polynomial curve fitting, which delivers high accuracy under favorable conditions. Furthermore, we introduce a lightweight, Multimodal, LLM-based framework that directly undergoes instruction tuning using small yet diverse datasets, eliminating the need for initial pretraining. This framework effectively handles various lane types, complex intersections, and merging zones, significantly enhancing lane detection reliability by reasoning under adverse conditions. Despite constraints in available training resources, our multimodal approach demonstrates advanced reasoning capabilities, achieving a Frame Overall Accuracy (FRM) of 53.87%, a Question Overall Accuracy (QNS) of 82.83%, lane detection accuracies of 99.6% in clear conditions and 93.0% at night, and robust performance in reasoning about lane invisibility due to rain (88.4%) or road degradation (95.6%). The proposed comprehensive framework markedly enhances AV perception reliability, thus contributing significantly to safer autonomous driving across diverse and challenging road scenarios.

Rethinking Lanes and Points in Complex Scenarios for Monocular 3D Lane Detection

Monocular 3D lane detection is a fundamental task in autonomous driving. Although sparse-point methods lower computational load and maintain high accuracy in complex lane geometries, current methods fail to fully leverage the geometric structure of lanes in both lane geometry representations and model design. In lane geometry representations, we present a theoretical analysis alongside experimental validation to verify that current sparse lane representation methods contain inherent flaws, resulting in potential errors of up to 20 m, which raise significant safety concerns for driving. To address this issue, we propose a novel patching strategy to completely represent the full lane structure. To enable existing models to match this strategy, we introduce the EndPoint head (EP-head), which adds a patching distance to endpoints. The EP-head enables the model to predict more complete lane representations even with fewer preset points, effectively addressing existing limitations and paving the way for models that are faster and require fewer parameters in the future. In model design, to enhance the model's perception of lane structures, we propose the PointLane attention (PL-attention), which incorporates prior geometric knowledge into the attention mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods on various state-of-the-art models. For instance, in terms of the overall F1-score, our methods improve Persformer by 4.4 points, Anchor3DLane by 3.2 points, and LATR by 2.8 points. The code will be available soon.

CleanMAP: Distilling Multimodal LLMs for Confidence-Driven Crowdsourced HD Map Updates

The rapid growth of intelligent connected vehicles (ICVs) and integrated vehicle-road-cloud systems has increased the demand for accurate, real-time HD map updates. However, ensuring map reliability remains challenging due to inconsistencies in crowdsourced data, which suffer from motion blur, lighting variations, adverse weather, and lane marking degradation. This paper introduces CleanMAP, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based distillation framework designed to filter and refine crowdsourced data for high-confidence HD map updates. CleanMAP leverages an MLLM-driven lane visibility scoring model that systematically quantifies key visual parameters, assigning confidence scores (0-10) based on their impact on lane detection. A novel dynamic piecewise confidence-scoring function adapts scores based on lane visibility, ensuring strong alignment with human evaluations while effectively filtering unreliable data. To further optimize map accuracy, a confidence-driven local map fusion strategy ranks and selects the top-k highest-scoring local maps within an optimal confidence range (best score minus 10%), striking a balance between data quality and quantity. Experimental evaluations on a real-world autonomous vehicle dataset validate CleanMAP's effectiveness, demonstrating that fusing the top three local maps achieves the lowest mean map update error of 0.28m, outperforming the baseline (0.37m) and meeting stringent accuracy thresholds (<= 0.32m). Further validation with real-vehicle data confirms 84.88% alignment with human evaluators, reinforcing the model's robustness and reliability. This work establishes CleanMAP as a scalable and deployable solution for crowdsourced HD map updates, ensuring more precise and reliable autonomous navigation. The code will be available at https://Ankit-Zefan.github.io/CleanMap/

Decoding Neighborhood Environments with Large Language Models

Neighborhood environments include physical and environmental conditions such as housing quality, roads, and sidewalks, which significantly influence human health and well-being. Traditional methods for assessing these environments, including field surveys and geographic information systems (GIS), are resource-intensive and challenging to evaluate neighborhood environments at scale. Although machine learning offers potential for automated analysis, the laborious process of labeling training data and the lack of accessible models hinder scalability. This study explores the feasibility of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Gemini as tools for decoding neighborhood environments (e.g., sidewalk and powerline) at scale. We train a robust YOLOv11-based model, which achieves an average accuracy of 99.13% in detecting six environmental indicators, including streetlight, sidewalk, powerline, apartment, single-lane road, and multilane road. We then evaluate four LLMs, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok, to assess their feasibility, robustness, and limitations in identifying these indicators, with a focus on the impact of prompting strategies and fine-tuning. We apply majority voting with the top three LLMs to achieve over 88% accuracy, which demonstrates LLMs could be a useful tool to decode the neighborhood environment without any training effort.

An Optimized Density-Based Lane Keeping System for A Cost-Efficient Autonomous Vehicle Platform: AurigaBot V1

The development of self-driving cars has garnered significant attention from researchers, universities, and industries worldwide. Autonomous vehicles integrate numerous subsystems, including lane tracking, object detection, and vehicle control, which require thorough testing and validation. Scaled-down vehicles offer a cost-effective and accessible platform for experimentation, providing researchers with opportunities to optimize algorithms under constraints of limited computational power. This paper presents a four-wheeled autonomous vehicle platform designed to facilitate research and prototyping in autonomous driving. Key contributions include (1) a novel density-based clustering approach utilizing histogram statistics for landmark tracking, (2) a lateral controller, and (3) the integration of these innovations into a cohesive platform. Additionally, the paper explores object detection through systematic dataset augmentation and introduces an autonomous parking procedure. The results demonstrate the platform's effectiveness in achieving reliable lane tracking under varying lighting conditions, smooth trajectory following, and consistent object detection performance. Though developed for small-scale vehicles, these modular solutions are adaptable for full-scale autonomous systems, offering a versatile and cost-efficient framework for advancing research and industry applications.

Chameleon: Fast-slow Neuro-symbolic Lane Topology Extraction

Lane topology extraction involves detecting lanes and traffic elements and determining their relationships, a key perception task for mapless autonomous driving. This task requires complex reasoning, such as determining whether it is possible to turn left into a specific lane. To address this challenge, we introduce neuro-symbolic methods powered by vision-language foundation models (VLMs). Existing approaches have notable limitations: (1) Dense visual prompting with VLMs can achieve strong performance but is costly in terms of both financial resources and carbon footprint, making it impractical for robotics applications. (2) Neuro-symbolic reasoning methods for 3D scene understanding fail to integrate visual inputs when synthesizing programs, making them ineffective in handling complex corner cases. To this end, we propose a fast-slow neuro-symbolic lane topology extraction algorithm, named Chameleon, which alternates between a fast system that directly reasons over detected instances using synthesized programs and a slow system that utilizes a VLM with a chain-of-thought design to handle corner cases. Chameleon leverages the strengths of both approaches, providing an affordable solution while maintaining high performance. We evaluate the method on the OpenLane-V2 dataset, showing consistent improvements across various baseline detectors. Our code, data, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/XR-Lee/neural-symbolic