31 accepted papers
We present DIO, a flexible world model that can estimate the scene occupancy-flow from a sparse set of LiDAR observations, and decompose it into individual instances. DIO can not only complete instance shapes at the present time, but also forecast their occupancy-flow evolution over a future horizon…
To perceive, humans use memory to fill in gaps caused by our limited visibility, whether due to occlusion or our narrow field of view. However, most 3D object detectors are limited to using sensor evidence from a short temporal window (0.1s-0.3s). In this work, we present a simple and effective add-…
Learning world models can teach an agent how the world works in an unsupervised manner. Even though it can be viewed as a special case of sequence modeling, progress for scaling world models on robotic applications such as autonomous driving has been somewhat less rapid than scaling language models…
"Large-scale data is crucial for learning realistic and capable driving policies. However, it can be impractical to rely on scaling datasets with real data alone. The majority of driving data is uninteresting, and deliberately collecting new long-tail scenarios is expensive and unsafe. We propose as…
A self-driving vehicle must understand its environment to determine the appropriate action. Traditional autonomy systems rely on object detection to find the agents in the scene. However, object detection assumes a discrete set of objects and loses information about uncertainty, so any errors compou…
Perceiving the world and forecasting its future state is a critical task for self-driving. Supervised approaches leverage annotated object labels to learn a model of the world --- traditionally with object detections and trajectory predictions or temporal bird's-eye-view (BEV) occupancy fields. Howe…
4D panoptic segmentation is a challenging but practically useful task that requires every point in a LiDAR point-cloud sequence to be assigned a semantic class label, and individual objects to be segmented and tracked over time. Existing approaches utilize only LiDAR inputs which convey limited info…
The task of motion forecasting is critical for self- driving vehicles (SDV s) to be able to plan a safe maneuver. Towards this goal, modern approaches reason about the map, the agents' past trajectories and their interactions in order to produce accurate forecasts. The predominant approach has been…
A self-driving vehicle (SDV) must be able to perceive its surroundings and predict the future behavior of other traffic participants. Existing works either perform object detection followed by trajectory forecasting of the detected objects, or predict dense occupancy and flow grids for the whole sce…
A major bottleneck to scaling-up training of self-driving perception systems are the human annotations required for supervision. A promising alternative is to leverage “auto-labelling” offboard perception models that are trained to automatically generate annotations from raw LiDAR point clouds at a…
Semantic segmentation of LiDAR point clouds has been widely studied in recent years, with most existing methods focusing on tackling this task using a single scan of the environment. However, leveraging the temporal stream of observations can provide very rich contextual information on regions of th…
The prevailing way to test a self-driving vehicle (SDV) in simulation involves non-reactive open-loop replay of real world scenarios. However, in order to safely deploy SDVs to the real world, we need to evaluate them in closed-loop. Towards this goal, we propose to leverage the wealth of interestin…
In this paper, we study the problem of unsupervised object detection from 3D point clouds in self-driving scenes. We present a simple yet effective method that exploits (i) point clustering in near-range areas where the point clouds are dense, (ii) temporal consistency to filter out noisy unsupervis…
As self-driving systems become better, simulating scenarios where the autonomy stack may fail becomes more important. Traditionally, those scenarios are generated for a few scenes with respect to the planning module that takes ground-truth actor states as input. This does not scale and cannot identi…
Over the last few years, we have witnessed tremendous progress on many subtasks of autonomous driving including perception, motion forecasting, and motion planning. However, these systems often assume that the car is accurately localized against a high-definition map. In this paper we question this…
Modern self-driving systems heavily rely on deep learning. As a consequence, their performance is influenced significantly by the quality and richness of the training data. Data collection platforms can generate many hours of raw data on a daily basis, however, it is not feasible to label everything…
Self-driving vehicles must perceive and predict the future positions of nearby actors to avoid collisions and drive safely. A deep learning module is often responsible for this task, requiring large-scale, high-quality training datasets. Due to high labeling costs, active learning approaches are an…
In this paper, we present LookOut, a novel autonomy system that perceives the environment, predicts a diverse set of futures of how the scene might unroll and estimates the trajectory of the SDV by optimizing a set of contingency plans over these future realizations. In particular, we learn a divers…
High-definition maps (HD maps) are a key component of most modern self-driving systems due to their valuable semantic and geometric information. Unfortunately, building HD maps has proven hard to scale due to their cost as well as the requirements they impose in the localization system that has to w…
In this paper we address an important problem in self-driving, forecasting multi-pedestrian motion and their shared scene occupancy map, which is critical for safe navigation. Our contributions are two-fold. First, we advocate for predicting both the individual motions as well as the scene occupancy…
Simulation has the potential to massively scale evaluation of self-driving systems, enabling rapid development as well as safe deployment. Bridging the gap between simulation and the real world requires realistic multi-agent behaviors. Existing simulation environments rely on heuristic-based models…
To achieve safe and proactive self-driving, an autonomous vehicle must accurately perceive its environment, and understand the interactions among traffic participants. In this paper, we aim to learn scene-consistent motion forecasts of complex urban traffic directly from sensor data. In particular,…
Predict, and Plan: Safe Motion Planning Through Interpretable Semantic Representations","In this paper we propose a novel end-to-end learnable network that performs joint perception, prediction and motion planning for self-driving vehicles and produces interpretable intermediate representations. Unl…
We tackle the problem of joint perception and motion forecasting in the context of self-driving vehicles. Towards this goal we propose PnPNet, an end-to-end model that takes as input sequential sensor data, and outputs at each time step object tracks and their future trajectories. The key component…
We tackle the problem of exploiting Radar for perception in the context of self-driving as Radar provides complementary information to other sensors such as LiDAR or cameras in the form of Doppler velocity. The main challenges of using Radar are the noise and measurement ambiguities which have been…
In this paper, we tackle the problem of relational behavior forecasting from sensor data. Towards this goal, we propose a novel spatially-aware graph neural network (SpAGNN) that models the interactions between agents in the scene. Specifically, we exploit a convolutional neural network to detect th…
Many modern robotics systems employ LiDAR as their main sensing modality due to its geometrical richness. Rolling shutter LIDARs are particularly common, in which a sweep is built through the accumulation of points over an entire revolution of the sensor, thus producing a 360 point cloud of the scen
Roads have well defined geometries, topologies, and traffic rules. While this has been widely exploited in motion planning methods to produce maneuvers that obey the law, little work has been devoted to utilize these priors in perception and motion forecasting methods. In this paper we propose to in…
Self-driving vehicles plan around both static and dynamic objects, applying predictive models of behavior to estimate future locations of the objects in the environment. However, future behavior is inherently uncertain, and models of motion that produce deterministic outputs are limited to short tim
In this paper, we propose a neural motion planner for learning to drive autonomously in complex urban scenarios that include traffic-light handling, yielding, and interactions with multiple road-users. Towards this goal, we design a holistic model that takes as input raw LIDAR data and a HD map and…
In order to plan a safe maneuver, self-driving vehicles need to understand the intent of other traffic participants. We define intent as a combination of discrete high level behaviors as well as continuous trajectories describing future motion. In this paper we develop a one-stage detector and forec