OpenLKA: an open dataset of lane keeping assist from market autonomous vehicles

The Lane Keeping Assist (LKA) system has become a standard feature in recent car models. While marketed as providing auto-steering capabilities, the system's operational characteristics and safety performance remain underexplored, primarily due to a lack of real-world testing and comprehensive data. To fill this gap, we extensively tested mainstream LKA systems from leading U.S. automakers in Tampa, Florida. Using an innovative method, we collected a comprehensive dataset that includes full Controller Area Network (CAN) messages with LKA attributes, as well as video, perception, and lateral trajectory data from a high-quality front-facing camera equipped with advanced vision detection and trajectory planning algorithms. Our tests spanned diverse, challenging conditions, including complex road geometry, adverse weather, degraded lane markings, and their combinations. A vision language model (VLM) further annotated the videos to capture weather, lighting, and traffic features. Based on this dataset, we present an empirical overview of LKA's operational features and safety performance. Key findings indicate: (i) LKA is vulnerable to faint markings and low pavement contrast; (ii) it struggles in lane transitions (merges, diverges, intersections), often causing unintended departures or disengagements; (iii) steering torque limitations lead to frequent deviations on sharp turns, posing safety risks; and (iv) LKA systems consistently maintain rigid lane-centering, lacking adaptability on tight curves or near large vehicles such as trucks. We conclude by demonstrating how this dataset can guide both infrastructure planning and self-driving technology. In view of LKA's limitations, we recommend improvements in road geometry and pavement maintenance. Additionally, we illustrate how the dataset supports the development of human-like LKA systems via VLM fine-tuning and Chain of Thought reasoning.

DrivingSphere: Building a High-fidelity 4D World for Closed-loop Simulation

Autonomous driving evaluation requires simulation environments that closely replicate actual road conditions, including real-world sensory data and responsive feedback loops. However, many existing simulations need to predict waypoints along fixed routes on public datasets or synthetic photorealistic data, \ie, open-loop simulation usually lacks the ability to assess dynamic decision-making. While the recent efforts of closed-loop simulation offer feedback-driven environments, they cannot process visual sensor inputs or produce outputs that differ from real-world data. To address these challenges, we propose DrivingSphere, a realistic and closed-loop simulation framework. Its core idea is to build 4D world representation and generate real-life and controllable driving scenarios. In specific, our framework includes a Dynamic Environment Composition module that constructs a detailed 4D driving world with a format of occupancy equipping with static backgrounds and dynamic objects, and a Visual Scene Synthesis module that transforms this data into high-fidelity, multi-view video outputs, ensuring spatial and temporal consistency. By providing a dynamic and realistic simulation environment, DrivingSphere enables comprehensive testing and validation of autonomous driving algorithms, ultimately advancing the development of more reliable autonomous cars. The benchmark will be publicly released.

On Learning Informative Trajectory Embeddings for Imitation, Classification and Regression

In real-world sequential decision making tasks like autonomous driving, robotics, and healthcare, learning from observed state-action trajectories is critical for tasks like imitation, classification, and clustering. For example, self-driving cars must replicate human driving behaviors, while robots and healthcare systems benefit from modeling decision sequences, whether or not they come from expert data. Existing trajectory encoding methods often focus on specific tasks or rely on reward signals, limiting their ability to generalize across domains and tasks. Inspired by the success of embedding models like CLIP and BERT in static domains, we propose a novel method for embedding state-action trajectories into a latent space that captures the skills and competencies in the dynamic underlying decision-making processes. This method operates without the need for reward labels, enabling better generalization across diverse domains and tasks. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We introduce a trajectory embedding approach that captures multiple abilities from state-action data. (2) The learned embeddings exhibit strong representational power across downstream tasks, including imitation, classification, clustering, and regression. (3) The embeddings demonstrate unique properties, such as controlling agent behaviors in IQ-Learn and an additive structure in the latent space. Experimental results confirm that our method outperforms traditional approaches, offering more flexible and powerful trajectory representations for various applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/Erasmo1015/vte.

Robust 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction with Calibration-free Spatial Transformation

3D semantic occupancy prediction, which seeks to provide accurate and comprehensive representations of environment scenes, is important to autonomous driving systems. For autonomous cars equipped with multi-camera and LiDAR, it is critical to aggregate multi-sensor information into a unified 3D space for accurate and robust predictions. Recent methods are mainly built on the 2D-to-3D transformation that relies on sensor calibration to project the 2D image information into the 3D space. These methods, however, suffer from two major limitations: First, they rely on accurate sensor calibration and are sensitive to the calibration noise, which limits their application in real complex environments. Second, the spatial transformation layers are computationally expensive and limit their running on an autonomous vehicle. In this work, we attempt to exploit a Robust and Efficient 3D semantic Occupancy (REO) prediction scheme. To this end, we propose a calibration-free spatial transformation based on vanilla attention to implicitly model the spatial correspondence. In this way, we robustly project the 2D features to a predefined BEV plane without using sensor calibration as input. Then, we introduce 2D and 3D auxiliary training tasks to enhance the discrimination power of 2D backbones on spatial, semantic, and texture features. Last, we propose a query-based prediction scheme to efficiently generate large-scale fine-grained occupancy predictions. By fusing point clouds that provide complementary spatial information, our REO surpasses the existing methods by a large margin on three benchmarks, including OpenOccupancy, Occ3D-nuScenes, and SemanticKITTI Scene Completion. For instance, our REO achieves 19.8$\times$ speedup compared to Co-Occ, with 1.1 improvements in geometry IoU on OpenOccupancy. Our code will be available at https://github.com/ICEORY/REO.

ITPNet: Towards Instantaneous Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving

Trajectory prediction of agents is crucial for the safety of autonomous vehicles, whereas previous approaches usually rely on sufficiently long-observed trajectory to predict the future trajectory of the agents. However, in real-world scenarios, it is not realistic to collect adequate observed locations for moving agents, leading to the collapse of most prediction models. For instance, when a moving car suddenly appears and is very close to an autonomous vehicle because of the obstruction, it is quite necessary for the autonomous vehicle to quickly and accurately predict the future trajectories of the car with limited observed trajectory locations. In light of this, we focus on investigating the task of instantaneous trajectory prediction, i.e., two observed locations are available during inference. To this end, we propose a general and plug-and-play instantaneous trajectory prediction approach, called ITPNet. Specifically, we propose a backward forecasting mechanism to reversely predict the latent feature representations of unobserved historical trajectories of the agent based on its two observed locations and then leverage them as complementary information for future trajectory prediction. Meanwhile, due to the inevitable existence of noise and redundancy in the predicted latent feature representations, we further devise a Noise Redundancy Reduction Former, aiming at to filter out noise and redundancy from unobserved trajectories and integrate the filtered features and observed features into a compact query for future trajectory predictions. In essence, ITPNet can be naturally compatible with existing trajectory prediction models, enabling them to gracefully handle the case of instantaneous trajectory prediction. Extensive experiments on the Argoverse and nuScenes datasets demonstrate ITPNet outperforms the baselines, and its efficacy with different trajectory prediction models.

Reference-Free Formula Drift with Reinforcement Learning: From Driving Data to Tire Energy-Inspired, Real-World Policies

The skill to drift a car--i.e., operate in a state of controlled oversteer like professional drivers--could give future autonomous cars maximum flexibility when they need to retain control in adverse conditions or avoid collisions. We investigate real-time drifting strategies that put the car where needed while bypassing expensive trajectory optimization. To this end, we design a reinforcement learning agent that builds on the concept of tire energy absorption to autonomously drift through changing and complex waypoint configurations while safely staying within track bounds. We achieve zero-shot deployment on the car by training the agent in a simulation environment built on top of a neural stochastic differential equation vehicle model learned from pre-collected driving data. Experiments on a Toyota GR Supra and Lexus LC 500 show that the agent is capable of drifting smoothly through varying waypoint configurations with tracking error as low as 10 cm while stably pushing the vehicles to sideslip angles of up to 63{\deg}.

DKMGP: A Gaussian Process Approach to Multi-Task and Multi-Step Vehicle Dynamics Modeling in Autonomous Racing

Autonomous racing is gaining attention for its potential to advance autonomous vehicle technologies. Accurate race car dynamics modeling is essential for capturing and predicting future states like position, orientation, and velocity. However, accurately modeling complex subsystems such as tires and suspension poses significant challenges. In this paper, we introduce the Deep Kernel-based Multi-task Gaussian Process (DKMGP), which leverages the structure of a variational multi-task and multi-step Gaussian process model enhanced with deep kernel learning for vehicle dynamics modeling. Unlike existing single-step methods, DKMGP performs multi-step corrections with an adaptive correction horizon (ACH) algorithm that dynamically adjusts to varying driving conditions. To validate and evaluate the proposed DKMGP method, we compare the model performance with DKL-SKIP and a well-tuned single-track model, using high-speed dynamics data (exceeding 230kmph) collected from a full-scale Indy race car during the Indy Autonomous Challenge held at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway at CES 2024. The results demonstrate that DKMGP achieves upto 99% prediction accuracy compared to one-step DKL-SKIP, while improving real-time computational efficiency by 1752x. Our results show that DKMGP is a scalable and efficient solution for vehicle dynamics modeling making it suitable for high-speed autonomous racing control.

Data Fusion of Semantic and Depth Information in the Context of Object Detection

Considerable study has already been conducted regarding autonomous driving in modern era. An autonomous driving system must be extremely good at detecting objects surrounding the car to ensure safety. In this paper, classification, and estimation of an object's (pedestrian) position (concerning an ego 3D coordinate system) are studied and the distance between the ego vehicle and the object in the context of autonomous driving is measured. To classify the object, faster Region-based Convolution Neural Network (R-CNN) with inception v2 is utilized. First, a network is trained with customized dataset to estimate the reference position of objects as well as the distance from the vehicle. From camera calibration to computing the distance, cutting-edge technologies of computer vision algorithms in a series of processes are applied to generate a 3D reference point of the region of interest. The foremost step in this process is generating a disparity map using the concept of stereo vision.

CARLA2Real: a tool for reducing the sim2real gap in CARLA simulator

Simulators are indispensable for research in autonomous systems such as self-driving cars, autonomous robots and drones. Despite significant progress in various simulation aspects, such as graphical realism, an evident gap persists between the virtual and real-world environments. Since the ultimate goal is to deploy the autonomous systems in the real world, closing the sim2real gap is of utmost importance. In this paper, we employ a state-ofthe-art approach to enhance the photorealism of simulated data, aligning them with the visual characteristics of real-world datasets. Based on this, we developed CARLA2Real, an easy-to-use, publicly available tool (plug-in) for the widely used and open-source CARLA simulator. This tool enhances the output of CARLA in near realtime, achieving a frame rate of 13 FPS, translating it to the visual style and realism of real-world datasets such as Cityscapes, KITTI, and Mapillary Vistas. By employing the proposed tool, we generated synthetic datasets from both the simulator and the enhancement model outputs, including their corresponding ground truth annotations for tasks related to autonomous driving. Then, we performed a number of experiments to evaluate the impact of the proposed approach on feature extraction and semantic segmentation methods when trained on the enhanced synthetic data. The results demonstrate that the sim2real gap is significant and can indeed be reduced by the introduced approach.

FollowGen: A Scaled Noise Conditional Diffusion Model for Car-Following Trajectory Prediction

Vehicle trajectory prediction is crucial for advancing autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Although deep learning-based approaches - especially those utilizing transformer-based and generative models - have markedly improved prediction accuracy by capturing complex, non-linear patterns in vehicle dynamics and traffic interactions, they frequently overlook detailed car-following behaviors and the inter-vehicle interactions critical for real-world driving applications, particularly in fully autonomous or mixed traffic scenarios. To address the issue, this study introduces a scaled noise conditional diffusion model for car-following trajectory prediction, which integrates detailed inter-vehicular interactions and car-following dynamics into a generative framework, improving both the accuracy and plausibility of predicted trajectories. The model utilizes a novel pipeline to capture historical vehicle dynamics by scaling noise with encoded historical features within the diffusion process. Particularly, it employs a cross-attention-based transformer architecture to model intricate inter-vehicle dependencies, effectively guiding the denoising process and enhancing prediction accuracy. Experimental results on diverse real-world driving scenarios demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance and robustness of the proposed method.