State Estimation Using Particle Filtering in Adaptive Machine Learning Methods: Integrating Q-Learning and NEAT Algorithms with Noisy Radar Measurements

Reliable state estimation is essential for autonomous systems operating in complex, noisy environments. Classical filtering approaches, such as the Kalman filter, can struggle when facing nonlinear dynamics or non-Gaussian noise, and even more flexible particle filters often encounter sample degeneracy or high computational costs in large-scale domains. Meanwhile, adaptive machine learning techniques, including Q-learning and neuroevolutionary algorithms such as NEAT, rely heavily on accurate state feedback to guide learning; when sensor data are imperfect, these methods suffer from degraded convergence and suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework that unifies particle filtering with Q-learning and NEAT to explicitly address the challenge of noisy measurements. By refining radar-based observations into reliable state estimates, our particle filter drives more stable policy updates (in Q-learning) or controller evolution (in NEAT), allowing both reinforcement learning and neuroevolution to converge faster, achieve higher returns or fitness, and exhibit greater resilience to sensor uncertainty. Experiments on grid-based navigation and a simulated car environment highlight consistent gains in training stability, final performance, and success rates over baselines lacking advanced filtering. Altogether, these findings underscore that accurate state estimation is not merely a preprocessing step, but a vital component capable of substantially enhancing adaptive machine learning in real-world applications plagued by sensor noise.

Pedestrian-Aware Motion Planning for Autonomous Driving in Complex Urban Scenarios

Motion planning in uncertain environments like complex urban areas is a key challenge for autonomous vehicles (AVs). The aim of our research is to investigate how AVs can navigate crowded, unpredictable scenarios with multiple pedestrians while maintaining a safe and efficient vehicle behavior. So far, most research has concentrated on static or deterministic traffic participant behavior. This paper introduces a novel algorithm for motion planning in crowded spaces by combining social force principles for simulating realistic pedestrian behavior with a risk-aware motion planner. We evaluate this new algorithm in a 2D simulation environment to rigorously assess AV-pedestrian interactions, demonstrating that our algorithm enables safe, efficient, and adaptive motion planning, particularly in highly crowded urban environments - a first in achieving this level of performance. This study has not taken into consideration real-time constraints and has been shown only in simulation so far. Further studies are needed to investigate the novel algorithm in a complete software stack for AVs on real cars to investigate the entire perception, planning and control pipeline in crowded scenarios. We release the code developed in this research as an open-source resource for further studies and development. It can be accessed at the following link: https://github.com/TUM-AVS/PedestrianAwareMotionPlanning

Real-Time Algorithms for Game-Theoretic Motion Planning and Control in Autonomous Racing using Near-Potential Function

Autonomous racing extends beyond the challenge of controlling a racecar at its physical limits. Professional racers employ strategic maneuvers to outwit other competing opponents to secure victory. While modern control algorithms can achieve human-level performance by computing offline racing lines for single-car scenarios, research on real-time algorithms for multi-car autonomous racing is limited. To bridge this gap, we develop game-theoretic modeling framework that incorporates the competitive aspect of autonomous racing like overtaking and blocking through a novel policy parametrization, while operating the car at its limit. Furthermore, we propose an algorithmic approach to compute the (approximate) Nash equilibrium strategy, which represents the optimal approach in the presence of competing agents. Specifically, we introduce an algorithm inspired by recently introduced framework of dynamic near-potential function, enabling real-time computation of the Nash equilibrium. Our approach comprises two phases: offline and online. During the offline phase, we use simulated racing data to learn a near-potential function that approximates utility changes for agents. This function facilitates the online computation of approximate Nash equilibria by maximizing its value. We evaluate our method in a head-to-head 3-car racing scenario, demonstrating superior performance compared to several existing baselines.

Epipolar Attention Field Transformers for Bird's Eye View Semantic Segmentation

Spatial understanding of the semantics of the surroundings is a key capability needed by autonomous cars to enable safe driving decisions. Recently, purely vision-based solutions have gained increasing research interest. In particular, approaches extracting a bird's eye view (BEV) from multiple cameras have demonstrated great performance for spatial understanding. This paper addresses the dependency on learned positional encodings to correlate image and BEV feature map elements for transformer-based methods. We propose leveraging epipolar geometric constraints to model the relationship between cameras and the BEV by Epipolar Attention Fields. They are incorporated into the attention mechanism as a novel attribution term, serving as an alternative to learned positional encodings. Experiments show that our method EAFormer outperforms previous BEV approaches by 2% mIoU for map semantic segmentation and exhibits superior generalization capabilities compared to implicitly learning the camera configuration.

Car-GS: Addressing Reflective and Transparent Surface Challenges in 3D Car Reconstruction

3D car modeling is crucial for applications in autonomous driving systems, virtual and augmented reality, and gaming. However, due to the distinctive properties of cars, such as highly reflective and transparent surface materials, existing methods often struggle to achieve accurate 3D car reconstruction.To address these limitations, we propose Car-GS, a novel approach designed to mitigate the effects of specular highlights and the coupling of RGB and geometry in 3D geometric and shading reconstruction (3DGS). Our method incorporates three key innovations: First, we introduce view-dependent Gaussian primitives to effectively model surface reflections. Second, we identify the limitations of using a shared opacity parameter for both image rendering and geometric attributes when modeling transparent objects. To overcome this, we assign a learnable geometry-specific opacity to each 2D Gaussian primitive, dedicated solely to rendering depth and normals. Third, we observe that reconstruction errors are most prominent when the camera view is nearly orthogonal to glass surfaces. To address this issue, we develop a quality-aware supervision module that adaptively leverages normal priors from a pre-trained large-scale normal model.Experimental results demonstrate that Car-GS achieves precise reconstruction of car surfaces and significantly outperforms prior methods. The project page is available at https://lcc815.github.io/Car-GS.

An Expert Ensemble for Detecting Anomalous Scenes, Interactions, and Behaviors in Autonomous Driving

As automated vehicles enter public roads, safety in a near-infinite number of driving scenarios becomes one of the major concerns for the widespread adoption of fully autonomous driving. The ability to detect anomalous situations outside of the operational design domain is a key component in self-driving cars, enabling us to mitigate the impact of abnormal ego behaviors and to realize trustworthy driving systems. On-road anomaly detection in egocentric videos remains a challenging problem due to the difficulties introduced by complex and interactive scenarios. We conduct a holistic analysis of common on-road anomaly patterns, from which we propose three unsupervised anomaly detection experts: a scene expert that focuses on frame-level appearances to detect abnormal scenes and unexpected scene motions; an interaction expert that models normal relative motions between two road participants and raises alarms whenever anomalous interactions emerge; and a behavior expert which monitors abnormal behaviors of individual objects by future trajectory prediction. To combine the strengths of all the modules, we propose an expert ensemble (Xen) using a Kalman filter, in which the final anomaly score is absorbed as one of the states and the observations are generated by the experts. Our experiments employ a novel evaluation protocol for realistic model performance, demonstrate superior anomaly detection performance than previous methods, and show that our framework has potential in classifying anomaly types using unsupervised learning on a large-scale on-road anomaly dataset.

Transfer Your Perspective: Controllable 3D Generation from Any Viewpoint in a Driving Scene

Self-driving cars relying solely on ego-centric perception face limitations in sensing, often failing to detect occluded, faraway objects. Collaborative autonomous driving (CAV) seems like a promising direction, but collecting data for development is non-trivial. It requires placing multiple sensor-equipped agents in a real-world driving scene, simultaneously! As such, existing datasets are limited in locations and agents. We introduce a novel surrogate to the rescue, which is to generate realistic perception from different viewpoints in a driving scene, conditioned on a real-world sample - the ego-car's sensory data. This surrogate has huge potential: it could potentially turn any ego-car dataset into a collaborative driving one to scale up the development of CAV. We present the very first solution, using a combination of simulated collaborative data and real ego-car data. Our method, Transfer Your Perspective (TYP), learns a conditioned diffusion model whose output samples are not only realistic but also consistent in both semantics and layouts with the given ego-car data. Empirical results demonstrate TYP's effectiveness in aiding in a CAV setting. In particular, TYP enables us to (pre-)train collaborative perception algorithms like early and late fusion with little or no real-world collaborative data, greatly facilitating downstream CAV applications.

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.

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.

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}.